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THE LORD'S PRAYER. 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 



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THOMAS WHITTAKER, 

PUBLISHER, 
2 and 3 Bible House, New-York. 



THE LORD'S PRAYER 



SERMONS PREACHED IN 
WESTMINSTER ABBEY 



BY 



F. W. FARRAR, D.D, F.R.S. 



ARCHDEACON OF WESTMINSTER 



NEW-YORK 
THOMAS WHITTAKER 

2 AND 3 BIBLE HOUSE 
1893 




^1>^<^ 



-^ 






Copyright, 1893, 
By Thomas Whittaker. 



WAsamoTON 



171, 173 Macdougal Street, New York 



PREFACE. 



These Sermons on the Lord's Prayer were preached 
in Westminster Abbey, with the exception of two or 
three deHvered in St. Margaret's, Westminster. They 
are of the plainest and simplest character, written from 
week to week as duty required. I had no intention 
of publishing them, and in allowing them to appear 
in this form I yield to considerable pressure, partly 
because I have reason to hope that they were found 
useful by many when they were delivered, and partly 
because they were taken down in shorthand and have 
been printed by others without permission and with 
imperfect accuracy. They make no pretensions to 
depth, originality, or literary finish, but aim directly 
and solely at religious edification. 

I can no longer trace back to their source many 
of the thoughts, and possibly even some of the ex- 
pressions, which occur in them. I was chiefly in- 
debted to the works on the Lord's Prayer by Bishop 

5 



6 PREFACE. 

Andrewes, Dr. Isaac Barrow, Archbishop Leighton, 

and Professor F. D. Maurice. It is certain, too, that 

I must have derived valuable hints from the Sermons 

and Addresses of my friends the Dean of Llandaff 

and Dr. Newman Hall. 

F. W. FARRAR. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

AFTER THIS MANNER PRAY YE 9 

OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN 25 

HALLOWED BE THY NAME 39 

THY KINGDOM COME 53 

THY WILL BE DONE 69 

GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD 87 

FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES IO3 

AS WE FORGIVE THEM THAT TRESPASS AGAINST US 121 

AND LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION I39 

BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 1 155 

BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. II I7I 

BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. Ill 187 

BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. IV 20I 

FOR THINE IS THE KINGDOM 213 

THE POWER AND THE GLORY 227 

FOR EVER AND EVER 239 

AMEN. 1 255 

AMEN, II 271 



AFTER THIS MANNER PRAY YE. 



After this manner pray ye. 

St. Matthew vi. 9. 

THE more the years pass on, the deeper becomes 
my conviction that religion does not mean, and 
has Httle to do with, many things it is taken to mean. 
It does not mean elaborate theologies ; it does not 
mean membership of this or that organization; it 
does not depend on orthodoxy in matters of opinion 
respecting which Christians differ. It means ''2, good 
heart and d. good life T Right conduct, a holy char- 
acter — these ar» the tests of the only sort of religion 
which is of the smallest value. All else will vanish ; 
this will remain. Of the many Hes which God's fiery 
finger will " shrivel from the souls of men," all sorts 
of religious shams, unrealities, human systems, shib- 
boleths, and accretions to the pure truth of His Gos- 
pel will be the most numerous. Love, joy, peace, 
long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, 
temperance — these are the only fruits of the Tree of 
Life which are genuine ; and the glossy leaves of 
arrogant Pharisaism are leaves for the poisoning — not 
for the healing — of the nations. 

With this conviction, during the last months of my 
residence as Canon I did not choose any recondite 

II 



12 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

subjects on which to speak to you, but chose the old, 
simple, majestic voice of Sinai, the Ten Words which 
comprise all the grandeur of the moral law. God's 
revelations fall under the two heads of the Law and 
the Gospel. The Law alone — holy as it is, and just 
and good — carries with it no power to secure our 
obedience. The voice of its archangelic trumpet, for 
sinners such as we are, does but shatter the darkness 
with menaces of doom. But Christ came with His 
Gospel to deliver us from the curse of the Law ; to 
secure us forgiveness for its past violation ; to inspire 
us with strength for future faithfulness. The forgive- 
ness was procured by Christ's sacrifice; the strength 
was inspired by His Spirit. The chief means where- 
by we can avail ourselves of both is prayer. 

That we should be allowed to pray, that access to 
God should thus be given us in Christ, is the most 
priceless boon granted to our humanity. I shall not 
waste time over theoretic difficulties which the sceptic 
may suggest about prayer. The instincts and the 
needs of humanity tear the difficulties of sceptics to 
shreds, and fling them to the winds. The voice of 
God in the heart of man imperiously bids him to 
make his requests known unto God. Yes, and let 
the sceptic himself but once be plunged into the 
waves and storms of calamity, and he belies his own 
negations, and pours out prayers which he cannot 
help to the God in whom he refuses to believe. It 
is told of Thistlewood, the Cato Street conspirator, 
that after arguing against the existence of a God, the 



AFTER THIS MANNER PRAY YE. 13 

moment he v/as left alone he was heard to fling him- 
self on his knees in his prison cell in a passion of 
entreaty, and that on the scaffold he poured out the 
agonized supplication, " O God, if there be a God, 
save my soul, if I have a soul!" 

It would be superfluous to argue with any one of 
you about the need of prayer, for there is not one of 
you who has not felt it. Rather let me remind you, 
Christian men and women, of the duty of prayer, 
since God bids us pray to Him ; and of the dignity 
of prayer, since therein the Almighty admits us, who 
are but dust and ashes, through Christ, into His very 
audience-chamber; and of the necessity for prayer, 
seeing that without it all our religious life will fade, 
as surely as the flowers on which no dew falls ; and 
of the consolation of prayer, by which alone we can 
cast our burden upon the Lord. -And let me remind 
you of the reflex benefits of prayer upon ourselves. 
Prayer, as St. Augustine says, brightens the heart 
and purges it for the acceptance of the gifts of 
heaven. Prayer strengthens the faith from which it 
springs ; it gives to hope its aTuaxapaSovia, the stretch- 
ing out of the neck, the standing a-tiptoe in earnest 
expectation ; it kindles love to a purer and brighter 
flame. All Christian graces come to us through 
prayer. 

These benefits of prayer speak for themselves. 
Nor need I detain you long by telling you what 
prayer is. I could not tell you anything better than 
what holy souls have said of it. ** Prayer," so wrote 



14 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

one of the saints of God in his private diary, is 
''want felt; help desired; faith to obtain that help." 
" Prayer," says another, '' is helplessness casting it- 
self upon power ; it is misery seeking peace ; it is un- 
holiness embracing purity ; it is hatred desiring love. 
Prayer is corruption panting for immortality; it is 
the eagle soaring heavenward ; it is the dove return- 
ing home; it is the prisoner pleading for release; it 
is the mariner steering for the haven amid the dan- 
gerous storm ; it is the soul, oppressed by the world, 
escaping to the empyrean, and bathing its ruffled 
plumes in the ethereal and the divine." 

" Prayer is the soul's sincere desire, 
Uttered or unexpressed ; 
The motion of a hidden fire, 
That trembles in the breast. 

" Prayer is the burthen of a sigh, 
The falling of a tear, 
The upward glancing of an eye 
When none but God is near. 

" Prayer is the Christian's vital breath, 
The Christian's native air ; 
His watchword at the gates of death, 
He enters heaven with prayer." 

Now, because prayer is a thing so blessed, and so 
necessary, let me urge on every person here present 
the message of our Lord, that they ought alw^ays to 
pray and not to faint. A Christian who does not 
pray is a dead Christian. He is not — he cannot be 
— a true Christian at all. For he violates the most 



AFTER THIS MANNER PRAY YE. 15 

imperious instinct, and flings away the chiefest bless- 
ing of the Christian life. He becomes like a man 
who is blind and lame, and who yet, though his path 
hes amid stumbling-blocks and precipices, flings away 
his crutch and drives away his guide. Oh! I fear 
that many, after their childish years, abandon the 
habit of praying altogether, to the fatal injury of all 
peace with God. And that is the reason why we 
see so many evil, so many disordered, so many abso- 
lutely depraved lives; that is the reason why the 
world is so full of misery and wickedness, and the 
Church so full of pettiness and malice. Oh ! if it be 
true of any of you that you no longer open the day 
and close the night with prayer, hear from my lips 
the call of God, that ere you be left fatally to your- 
selves you should resume it. Begin this very day. 
Do not retire to rest this night till you have knelt 
before the God of your life, and asked Him, for His 
dear Son's sake, to forgive all your neglect, all your 
backsliding, all your wickedness. It may be the very 
saving of your soul. You will find an infinite bless- 
edness in doing so. If you come to your Saviour, 
He will receive you graciously. He will love you 
freely. 

Is not this the very reason why God makes prayer 
so incredibly easy to us ? " Every time, place, pos- 
ture," it has been truly said, is easy. "Talent is 
not needful ; eloquence is out of place ; dignity is no 
recommendation. Our want is our eloquence, our 
misery our recommendation. Thought is quick as 



1 6 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

lightning, and quick as lightning can it multiply 
effectual prayer. Prayer needs no ceremonies ; rubrics 
are childishness to it. The whole function is simply 
this : a child, a wandering child, comes to its Father, 
and pleads for grace and pity, for forgiveness and for 
help." 

But now, just because God has made prayer so 
easy, because it is of such vital importance, Satan — 
God's enemy and ours — does his utmost to ruin for 
us this gift of God. And this he does in two ways. 
He diverts us from prayer; he tries to pervert our 
prayer itself into sin. 

First, he diverts us from prayer. He knows that, 
if he can succeed in that, we are his slaves. He 
makes us too proud too pray ; he suggests doubts of 
the usefulness of prayer; he crowds prayer out of 
our lives with earth's follies and emptiness ; he whis- 
pers to us that we are too wicked to pray ; he tells 
us that there will be time enough to pray when pas- 
sion is dead and youth is over. Ah, my friends, be 
not ignorant of his devices! This is Satan's way of 
lulling you to fatal security, of robbing you of your 
armor, of keeping you defenceless amid fierce temp- 
tations and sundry kinds of death. He knows well 
that either praying will make you leave off sinning, 
in which case you are delivered out of his snares ; or 
that sinning will make you leave off praying, in which 
'case, unless God in His mercy pluck you as a brand 
out of the burning, you will be saved only as by fire. 



AFTER THIS MANNER PRAY YE. 17 

Now Christ does not contemplate the possibility 
of a Christian who has ceased to pray ; such a Chris- 
tian is in God's sight no Christian ; but he warns us 
of the other danger, that Satan, if he cannot divert 
our prayers, will do his utmost to pervert them. And 
on this head He gave two warnings : one against idle 
verbiage ; the other against hypocritic formality. *' In 
praying," he said, " use not vain repetitions, as the 
heathen do." The Hindoo fakir will spend all day 
in repeating over and over again the name of his deity. 
The Buddhist bonze thinks that there is salvation in 
the endless repetition of his magic formula. The 
Mussulman will interlard his commonest, and even 
his wickedest speech, with endless parentheses of 
" God is great," " God is compassionate." The igno- 
rant Romanist repeats his Aves and his Paters^ drop- 
ping a bead with every Paternoster. God bears com- 
passionately with our fooleries, but in itself this, and 
all that our Lord calls pattoXoYia and :roXoXoYta, is 
mere stuttering, and the tumbling out of empty 
words. And at last prayer becomes degraded into 
a fetishistic mechanism, and the Tartar thinks that 
he offers so many thousand prayers with every clat- 
ter of his prayer-mill. 

Long prayers, even repeated prayers, may have 
their place. St. Augustine tells us that he spent all 
the night In the single prayer, Noverim te, Doniine ; 
noverim me. (" O Lord, may I know Thee ! may I 
know myself!") Such a prayer does not break our 
Lord's command, so long as the prayer continues to 



1 8 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

be intense and fervent. Our Lord sometimes spent 
whole nights in prayer; and in Gethsemane He 
prayed thrice over, using the same words. But the 
moment a prayer becomes a mechanical weariness, 
the moment the lips repeat it but the heart cannot 
follow, it ceases to be a prayer, and becomes a mock- 
ery. " What God requires and looks at," says Bishop 
Hall, *' is neither the arithmetic of our prayers, — how 
many they are ; nor the rhetoric of our prayers, — 
how eloquent they be ; nor the geometry of our 
prayers, — how long they be ; nor the music of our 
prayers, — how sweet our voice may be ; nor the logic, 
nor the method, nor even the orthodoxy of our pray- 
ers " ; but the one thing which avails is ferventness 
and sincerity. Long Sunday services, endless daily 
services, may be, and often become, an idle waste of 
time, or mere superstitious and mechanical functions. 
The most effectual prayers which Scripture records 
were the very briefest : '* God be merciful to me the 
sinner!"; *' Lord, what wouldst Thou have me to 
do? " ; " Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!" 

Do not let us deceive ourselves as to the value of 
outward forms. They may be^mere bodily exercise; 
they may represent neither true Christian work nor 
any fraction of furtherance of the kingdom of heaven. 
They may only deaden us into spiritual torpor and 
inflate us with Pharisaic pride. Few, very few — 
none but God's truest saints — can make long prayers ; 
and when our Lord gave His model prayer, saying, 
" Thus pray ye," knowing our wants, knowing our 



AFTER THIS MANNER PRAY YE. 19 

nature, knowing our sole capabilities, His model was 
brevity itself. Prayer is no bare huddle of ceremo- 
nies, or heaping up of formal words in empty churches. 
Be they hurriedly babbled, or be they unctuously 
droned, or be they pompously rolled forth, they may 
be no more than the idle speaking and much speaking 
against which Christ warns us. Far better that our 
prayers should only occupy five minutes and be sin- 
cere, rising like incense through the golden censer of 
our one and only Priest, Christ Jesus, than that they 
should be a spiritless mummery, or that they should 
resemble the idle vaunt of the Pharisee, — a prayer 
kindled with the strange fire of pride, which stank to 
heaven. 

''Thus pray ye," said Christ, and therefore any 
other manner must be a wrong manner. Now, in 
subsequent sermons I propose, God helping me, to 
study with you the Lord's Prayer, clause by clause ; 
convinced, as I said, that in these divine and simple 
formulae — in the Lord's Prayer, in the Sermon on the 
Mount, in the Ten Commandments, in the Apostles' 
Creed — we shall find, over and over again, more 
truth, more orthodoxy, more divinity, more spiritual 
elevation and comfort, than in all the voluminous in- 
struction which teaches for doctrines the command- 
ments of men. 

Why need we worry ourselves and the poor simple 
souls of God's children with the intolerable and inter- 
minable prolixities of party opinionativeness and con- 
troversial dogmatism ? What avails it to magnify the 



20 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

non-essential, altering the whole perspective of- the 
New Testament, substituting medieval corruptions 
for Gospel truths, and confusing men's consciences 
by the invention of artificial sins, when we see all 
around us that these developments may be as alien 
as possible from even the most elementary of Chris- 
tian graces? If we are deceived by pretension and 
nullities it is our own fault. After all the mischief 
that priests and systems have done, nothing is simpler 
than true rehgion. It is the way of holiness, in 
which not even the fool need err. It is to serve God 
with all our heart. So Christ taught. He said that 
the golden rule of love comprised all the Law and 
the Prophets. What does the Lord require of any 
one of us? To do justice, and to love mercy, and to 
walk humbly with our God : that and nothing more. 
So teaches the Old Testament. How are we to enter 
into life? Christ's answer to the question was : Keep 
the Commandments. Go to Him, confess to Him, 
ask of Him, and you need never be misled by the 
vain teaching of erring men. And as you have heard 
two of His warnings about this infinitely important 
duty of prayer, so hear these other warnings of which 
His Word is full. 

First, remember God will hear no wicked prayer. 
Men have been known to ask God for what they 
would not dare to ask men. The Hindoo Thug 
prays to his goddess that his murders may be 
accomplished. The Italian bandit thanks the Virgin 



AFTRR THIS MANNER PRAY YE. 21 

for the success of his raid. In the heathen satirist, 
the hypocrite prays to Laverna that he may deceive 
successfully, and that men may think him holy and 
just. Against such prayers I need hardly warn you. 
They are as if a man offered swine's flesh upon the 
altar. 

But we all need much more an earnest warning 
against selfish and earthly prayers. Of all the seven 
petitions of the Lord's Prayer, one only is for the 
simplest of earthly needs, and even in that the 
heavenly is mingled with the earthly. We may 
mention to God our earthly desires, but never with- 
out the two humble provisos : Only if it be good for 
me ; only if it be Thy will. For, as the heathen poet 
says, " The gods have overthrown whole houses at 
their own desire ;" and as our own Shakespeare sings : 

" We, ignorant of ourselves, 
Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers 
Deny us for our good ; so find we profit 
By losing of our prayers." 

Nothing is a more paltry abuse of prayer than the 
mean and selfish pestering of God with '' undue and 
unworthy suits." '' O Allah," prayed the Mussul- 
man, '' I want a hundred sequins. Just a hundred 
sequins, neither more nor less. O Allah, give me a 
hundred sequins!" If that be all a man has to ask 
of God, he might just as well not ask at all. Far 
better is it, as even pagans have taught, to feel that 
man is dearer to God than to himself, and to ask Him 



22 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

only to supply our deepest needs. The poet was ver- 
sifying a sentence of Plato when he wrote : 

** Not what we wish, but what we want^ 
Thy bounteous grace supply : 
The good, unasked, in mercy grant ; 
The ill, though asked, deny." 

Lastly, as we should hate wicked prayers and shun 
fooHsh and futile prayers, let us never forget that our 
prayers are as zi^e are. The prayer of the wicked is 
an abomination to the Lord. By the prayer of the 
wicked is not meant for a moment the prayer of sin- 
ners who come as sinners, desiring to sin no more; 
but the prayer of the wicked, in the midst of wicked- 
ness, who do not mean to abandon that wickedness. 
The prayer of men who vainly try to deceive God as 
well as themselves — of men who go on still in their 
wickedness, of men who want to ser\'e God and 
Mammon, to worship Christ and yet keep all their 
ow^n vilest idols — ^that is an abomination to the Lord. 
If we come to God with a sin upon our conscience, 
and do not mean to abandon that sin ; if the cheating 
tradesman calls his family to prayers but does not 
mean to give up his adulterations and frauds, his false 
balances and deceitful weights; if a man kneels to 
God with his heart full of raging malice and hatred, 
and has not the slightest intention to be just to his 
opponents — his ver\^ prayer is but a sin, which adds 
deeper blackness to his other sins. If a man has 
merely touched an unclean insect and thrown it away, 



AFTER THIS MANNER PRAY YE. 23 

say the Rabbis, the smallest drop of water is sufficient 
to purify him ; but if he holds the creeping thing in 
his hand, defilement will continue to cleave to him 
though he use for lustration all the waters of the sea. 
Even so is the man who prays that his sin may be 
pardoned and yet does not mean to renounce it. St. 
Augustine tells us, in his '' Confessions," how, when 
a youth, he was miserably entangled in the lusts of 
the flesh, and prayed to God to deliver him, secretly 
hoping that God would not hear him just yet, in order 
that he might sin a little longer. Ah! such a prayer 
as that is worse than valueless ; it is blasphemous : 
and as for its being heard, a man might as well pray 
(as the Russian writer says they mostly do pray) that 
two and two may not make four. 

No uninspired writer has illustrated this awful truth 
with more force than our own Shakespeare in his 
*' Hamlet." There the murderous, adulterous king 
kneels down to pray. Not even he, observe, would 
be in the least too bad to pray ; not even the prodi- 
gal, so he have but left the far country Vv^ith its husks 
and swine, will be rejected at the throne of grace. 
And this the bad king feels. ** What," he says — 

" What if this cursed hand 
Were thicker than itself in brother's blood, 
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens 
To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy 
But to confront the visage of offence ? " 

But then he is at once met by the fatal fact that 
remorse and misery are not repentance, and that 



24 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

he does not repent since he still means to keep his 
sin. 

" Oh, what form of prayer 
Can serve my turn? ' Forgive me my foul murther '? 
That cannot be ; since I am still possess'd 
Of those effects for which I did the murther, 
My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen. 
May one be pardoned and retain the offence ? " 

Ah, no! forever and forever no! And so, though 
he still remains upon his knees, he soon finds that his 
prayer is but a hollow mockery, and rising, he sighs 
aloud : 

** My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; 
Words without thoughts never to heaven go." 

Ah, my friends, it is for this reason that prayer 
may be so infinite a boon to you. Satan trembles 
when he sees not only '' the weakest saint," but even 
the vilest sinner, *' on his knees." He knows that the 
sinner is escaping him, if it can be said of him " Be- 
hold, he prayeth." Prayer is God's own antidote for 
sin. It is God's means of our gaining that gift of the 
Holy Spirit which can sanctify us from sin. It is 
God's means of applying to our souls individually 
that forgiveness of sins which Christ hved and died to 
gain for all our race. Ah ! offer not the prayer of 
the wicked, but the prayer of the humble publican, 
the prayer of the penitent prodigal, and then be sure 
that it will be granted. For it is Christ Himself who 
invites us. ** Come unto Me," He says, '' all ye that 
are weary and heavy laden, and I will refresh you " ; 
and " Him that cometh unto Me, I will in no wise 
cast out. " 



OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN 



25 



Our Father which art in heaven. 

St. Matthew vi. 9. 

MANY of you, perhaps, think that you know all 
that can be said about a theme so simple as 
the Lord's Prayer, My friends, I doubt whether the 
greatest and most learned of us has mastered so much 
as a fragment of what we may learn from it. Unlike 
the puerilities and pettinesses, of human dogmatism, 
these great eternal words of the Son of God are un- 
fathomable as the deep. Its surface may flash with 
a network of sunbeams in innumerable laughter ; but 
what does the gilded shallop which glides over its 
summer calm know of the might of its billows or the 
majesty of its storms? Its wavelets may break in 
rippling music at our feet ; but what does the child 
who plays beside them guess of its unseen abysses, 
and of the whole swing of the ocean on which those 
tiny rippling waves depend? 

" The Paternoster," says Maurice, '' is not, as some 
fancy, the easiest, most natural of all devout utter- 
ances. It may be committed to memory quickly, 
but it is slowly learned by heart. Men may repeat 
it over ten times in an hour, but to know what it 
means, not to contradict it in the very moment of 

27 



28 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

praying it, not to construct our prayers upon the 
model most unlike it, that is hard." Yes, it is hard, 
for it requires the spiritual mind. Sensuous forms of 
worship are cheap and easy, but it takes almost an 
angel to worship God in spirit and in truth. 

Have we ever realized how infinite was the impor- 
tance of the request, how supreme the boon of Its 
concession, when the Apostles said : '' Lord, teach us 
to pray, as John also taught his disciples"? Here 
is no earthly teacher speaking, no petty, human the- 
ologian, but God Himself teaching us how to pray 
to God. Deep should be our gratitude that this ex- 
ample of prayer is so plain that a little one can utter 
it, so profound that not the wisest of us all can fully 
explore its hidden treasures. 

But how awfully anxious should we be to catch at 
least the keynote which is struck by the Son of God 
to show us the manner in which we should make our 
approach to God! That keynote is struck in this 
address: ''Our Father which art in heaven." It 
teaches us on the very threshold of prayer to com- 
pose our hearts before Him, to check the idle roving 
of our thoughts, to serve the Lord with fear, and re- 
joice with trembling. 

''Our Father ivJiich art in heaven^ '' Which art." 
He who cometh to God must believe that He is. 
Yet. how many of us really believe that God is; that 
our lives are passed in His presence; that He is a 
besetting God ; that His eye sees us always ; that 
He is *' of purer eyes than to behold iniquity " ; that 



OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN. 29 

when we kneel down on our knees before Him we 
enter the very audience-chamber of the King of 
kings? Oh! is it such a nothing that this awful, 
eternal, infinite God suffers us to take refuge with 
Him from the worthlessness of the world and the 
baseness of our own hearts ? When we remember all 
our sins and shames, when our iniquities take such 
hold upon us that we are not able to look up ; or 
when, on the other hand, our hearts are full of cold- 
ness and insolence, do the words of Joshua never 
flash upon our memory : '' Ye cannot serve God, for 
He is a holy God, He is a jealous God ; He will not 
forgive your transgression nor your sins " ? Do we 
never contrast them with the forgiving love which 
taught us to say, *' Our Father " ? 

And '' Which art in heaven " : more accurately, 
"in the heavens." *' In heaven," not as Hmited 
thereto by local space, but as manifested therein 
among the holy spirits whom He loves. The heaven 
and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him. 
Heaven is everywhere where He is. Sursicm corda 
— Lift up your hearts! 

" What is this we find in ourselves," asks Leighton, 
" that makes us so drunk with self-conceit, not only 
in our converse one with another, but with God? 
Surely we know Him not ; at least we consider not 
who He is, where He dwells ; who we are, and where 
we dwell. Surely it would lay us low if, when we 
come before God, we would consider Him as the 
most glorious King sitting on His throne, compassed 



30 



THE LORD'S PRAYER. 



with glorious spirits ; and we ourselves coming before 
Him as base frogs, creeping out of our pond where 
we dwell amidst the mire of sinful pollutions." By 
this great addition God would prevent us from ming- 
ling our prayers with the impertinences of frivoHty 
and the senselessness of babbling repetitions. But in 
this way also He would uplift our nothingness into 
His sublimity. It compresses into three words the 
great verse of Isaiah : '' Thus saith the High and 
Lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is 
Holy : I dwell in the high and holy place, with him 
also [a marvellous ''also"!], that is of a broken and 
humble spirit" : — '' the highest heavens are the hab- 
itation of His glory, and the humble heart hath the 
next honor to be the habitation of His grace." 

And thus we see that reverence is the keynote of 
the prayer taught us by the Son of God Himself. 
How, save with reverence, can we approach the God 
who chargeth even His angels with folly, and in whose 
sight the very heavens are not clean? We are told 
of the bright Seraphim that each of them had six 
wings. '' With tvs-ain he covered his face, with twain 
he covered his feet, and with twain did he fly." It 
is in awful reverence that the bright and blameless 
faces are veiled with those silver wings and feathers 
like gold. Petty, conceited, ill-mannered irreverence 
— irreverence of men and w^omen in their demeanor 
in the Church of God — is always a mark of a vulgar 
and a shallow nature. No noble nature yet was ever 
irreverent. The spirit of reverence to God, and to 



OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN. 31 

the place where His honor dwelleth, is the mark of 
the starry spirits before His sapphire-colored throne ; 
and they in God's presence veil their face's with their 
wings. House-flies, too, have wings, such as they 
are, and the house-fly is the type of impudent con- 
ceit which honors nothing but its worthless self, and 
which buzzes with equal noise and equal self-satis- 
faction about the crown of a king or the forehead of 
a martyr burning at the stake. Like that wretched 
insect is he or she whose chattering and giggling 
emptiness carries even into God's presence and wor- 
ship the pertness of the popinjay or the brutal swag- 
ger of a churl. 

Now, we shall be always wise to learn of the 
greatest intellects; and Dante, the supreme poet of 
Catholicism — '' soul awful, if this world has ever held 
an awful soul " — seized with accurate intuition this 
keynote of the Lord's Prayer. He saw in it the 
eternal rebuke of that pride which is at once the 
commonest and most fatal of human sins. In Dante's 
Purgatorio, after he and his guide have climbed the 
three steps — the white step of sincerity, the dark- 
purple step of contrition, the flaming step of love — to 
stand before the angel of penitence on the diamond 
threshold which typifies Christ's merits — after they 
have passed through the wicket- gate, they come to 
the lowest of the seven narrow terraces which run 
round the Mountain of Purgatory. It is the terrace 
of pride, and is carved with divine examples of 
humility. Here they see a great multitude advanc- 



32 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

ing towards them, bent down to earth under the 
weight of heavy rocks, and reminding Dante as they 
crawl along of the corbels in Gothic buildings bent 
double under the weight of superincumbent columns, 
their knees touching their breasts, and seeming to 
say, with tears, " More I cannot bear." And as he 
sees them in vision, and thinks of the shallow conceit 
of men on earth, Dante exclaims : '' O haughty 
Christians, wretched, heavy-laden, weak in mental 
vision, perceive ye not that we are but worms born 
to bring forth the angelic butterfly that soars un- 
clothed to judgment? Why are your souls so puffed 
up with pride? Ye are but as insects, as yet but 
half complete, whose formation is defective." And 
then, as these once proud, but now half-crushed, 
spirits crawl towards him in their penitence, he hears 
that they are chanting a paraphrase of the Lord's 
Prayer as part of their discipline. They had learnt 
and said it in their childhood ; and now they have to 
become once more as Httle children, and repeat it in 
the fulness of its meaning, making of every single 
clause an act of submission and humility. The be- 
setting sin of Dante himself was pride, and in the 
Lord's Prayer he had found, as we may find, the 
antidote against it. 

But if the words " Which art in heaven " are meant 
to strike the keynote of reverence, the words '' Our 
Father" give us the dominant notes of trustfulness 
and love. It was said of the Emperor Augustus that 
they who dared to speak to him rashly, failed to 



OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN. 33 

appreciate his greatness, but that they who, out of 
fear, dared not speak to him at all, knew not how 
good he was. So it is with God. He wishes us to 
be reverent, but not abject. We are but dust and 
ashes; yet He suffers — nay, urges us — to come to 
Him. As unworthy sons — as prodigals — yes! but 
still as sons. He invites us to call Him Father. By 
this title our humbleness is uplifted into sublimity. 
*' Brethren, behold what manner of love the Father 
has manifested to us, that we should be called chil- 
dren of God: Yet such we are," for He has Him- 
self sanctioned this ''immense pretension." This 
Fatherhood of God was the most central, the most 
essential part of the revelation which Christ came to 
give. 

The sense of ** Father " here is far deeper than that 
in which the word was used by the heathen of God 
as our Creator; far deeper than that in which the 
Jews used it of Jehovah as the Covenant God of their 
race. Those privileges of natural and Covenant 
relation have been made fruitless by our sins. The 
word ''Father" here is a witness and appeal to the 
Incarnation. It means the Fatherhood which we 
may claim as brethren of God's only-begotten Son. 
It means the Fatherhood, not only by generation, but 
by regeneration; not of birth, but of the new birth. 
The deeper is our holiness the more inexhaustibly 
divine the word " Father " becomes to us. If we 
could utter it aright earth would become a heaven. 
"As many as received Him to them gave He the 



34 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

right to become children of God, even to them that 
beHeve on His name." 

When Christ said, " I go to My Father and your 
Father, and to My God and your God," the words 
were not exactly as we render them. It was Trpog 
Tov Tuaispa [j.oo %al Tuarspa ^[awv : ''To the Father 
of Me, and Father of you." " First of Me," says 
Bishop Pearson, " then of you. Not, therefore, His 
because ours, but therefore ours because His." 

And it is remarkable that, though Christ taught its 
to say ''oitr Father," He never used that form Him- 
self, but spoke of God as *' the Father," as ''My 
Father," and ''your Father"; but never of "our 
Father," because, among all the sons of God, there 
is none like to that one Son of God. 

Nor is the address " Our Father " a witness to the 
Incarnation only, but also to Pentecost. ''As many 
as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of 
God." If you are led by the Spirit of God, neither 
sect, nor Church, nor party, nor system, nor any 
unauthorized intrusions and usurpations of men as 
feeble as yourselves, can bar your happy access to 
His immediate presence. You need none to intro- 
duce you but Christ, none to intercede for you but 
Christ, none to absolve you but Christ: 

" Yes, one unquestioned text we read, 
All doubt beyond, all fear above ; 
Nor crackling pile, nor cursing creed, 
Can burn or blot it : God is love." 



OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN. 35 

Only, remember that vast privileges involve im- 
mense duties. *' If I be a Father," says God to you, 
** where is Mine honor?" If you be living to the 
flesh, if you be Hving the life of polluted and selfish 
animalism, if you are one of those depraved, dissolute, 
selfish, conceited, untrustworthy, malignant creatures, 
of whom, alas ! the world is so full, and have no will 
to abandon that vile life, how can you call God 
Father? It is not as animals, not as beasts, that we 
are His children, but only as redeemed and spiritual 
beings. Oh, every time that we claim as our Father 
Him who is eternal in the heavens, remember that 
the title should overwhelm us with shame and con- 
fusion unless we utter it in memory of His own warn- 
ing: " Be ye holy, for I am holy." 

There remains one word more — no less rich in 
meaning than are the rest — it is the word '' Our." 
It is a protest against that selfishness which is so 
ingrained in our nature that it tends to intrude even 
into our holiest things. We are not to pray '^My 
Father," for God is only the Father of each as He 
is the Father of all. Were it not so, we should be 
often tempted to carry our arrogant exclusiveness and 
our selfish monopolies even into our prayers. Nay, 
but they must be extended not only as wide as the 
communion of saints, but as the human race. This 
prayer is vast as charity itself. God will not have us 
in our collective conceit — our conceit of Churchman- 
ship or of opinion — any more than in our individual 



36 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

conceit, try vainly to make for ourselves enclosures 
in His universal heaven. He will not suffer us, be- 
cause we belong to this fold, or hold these opinions, 
to assert any preferential claims to His many man- 
sions. Is it hard for you when you pray " Our 
Father" to include in that prayer all who hate you 
without a cause ; all who slander and undermine you ; 
all who are champions of causes w^hich you believe 
to be steeped in falsity ; all who in their arrogance 
treat you as though you were dust beneath their feet ; 
all whose vanity and opinionativeness come into rude 
collision with your own; all the wrong-doers who 
make the hfe of men more wicked and more miser- 
able ? Yes, in the very highest exercise of your Hves 
you miLst associate yourselves with them. You can- 
not speak for yourself without also speaking for them. 
You dare not carry your own sins, which so deeply 
need forgiveness, before God's throne of grace, with- 
out also carrying theirs. The word *' Our" is indis- 
solubly joined with the word '' Father." The prayer 
is, in one word, a Paternoster, and the name '' Father " 
loses its significance for us individually when we will 
not use it as the members of a family. 

See, then, how deep is the meaning in this prayer. 
Its first word, *' Our," is a plea for the universal 
brotherhood of our race, and for our universal charity 
towards even those brethren of whom we are tempted 
to think most unkindly and most contemptuously. 
The word '' Father" is the appeal of love, reminding 
us, not only of our creation, but also of our re-crea- 



OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN, 37 

tion, of our brotherhood with the incarnate Christ, of 
His Spirit shed abroad in our hearts, whereby we cry, 
''Abba, Father." The words '' Which art in heaven " 
temper with humihty and solemn reverence our new 
friendship and fiHal relation with God. 

Who is sufficient for these things ? How can we 
utter even this brief preface to the prayer aright? 
My friends, every one of us can in his measure utter 
it aright whose heart is loving and humble. Not the 
bragging Pharisee ; not the domineering Churchman ; 
not the hard hater and despiser of his brother sin- 
ners in the great family of God ; but the little child, 
the ignorant, weeping prodigal, the simple, repentant 
publican, the forsaken beggar in the streets ; and yet 
not even the soul of a Dante or a Milton — nay, not 
even the burning Cherubim and Seraphim of heaven 
can utter it in all its fulness. 

Is it, then, too high, too deep for creatures such as 
we are? Would you have it otherwise? Would 
you have a prayer which you can fathom? Nay; 
such a prayer could never have come from the lips of 
the Son of God. Its absolute simplicity, its fathom- 
less meaning, its all-embracing charity, are the stamp 
of its divine origin. This is why it has "'shallows 
which the lamb may ford, and depths which the 
elephant must swim." To pride and Pharisaism, to 
selfishness and hatred, it will remain forever a dead 
and empty formula. But it will tremble into angelic 
music to the ear of humility, and glow and breathe with 
all its celestial ardor to the heart of gentleness and love. 



HALLOWED BE THY NAME, 



39 



Hallowed be Thy name. 

St. Matthew vi. 9. 

MANY, I think, if they spoke with perfect frank- 
ness, would say that, of all the seven petitions 
in the Lord's Prayer, this is the one which is least 
real to them. Is it so with any of you who hear me ? 
If it is so, should not this be a strong reason for 
examining more deeply what the petition means? 
For observe that our Lord not only made room for it 
in this brief prayer, but placed it in the very fore- 
front ; and did so though He had just been uttering 
the strongest possible warning against all vain and 
artificial petitions. Milton sings of the evening star : 

" Hesperus, that led 
The starry train, rode brightest." 

The first star is the most lustrous of all the night. 
May not this first prayer " Hallowed be Thy name " 
be the brightest of all ; the most radiant Pleiad of the 
seven petitions? 

I think that it is ; and oh that God would give us 
this evening star! 

For observe, *' Hallowed be Thy name " is almost 
the last thing which we should think of putting into 

41 



42 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

our prayers. Least of all should we be inclined to 
put this prayer before all the rest, because we are 
essentially and intensely selfish, and this prayer is 
absolutely and supremely unselfish. We saw that 
Christ insisted upon unselfishness when He taught 
us to say " Our Father" ; in this petition, with yet 
diviner force, He teaches, not unselfishness only, but 
self-forgetfulness. If in the Preface *' Our Father 
which art in heaven" He strikes the keynotes of rev- 
erence and trustfulness, in the first clause He points 
to the absorption of the thought of self in the thought 
of God as the only true orientation of our prayers. 
It is as though He said to us : You are not to Hve 
for yourself ; your chief end is to glorify God here, 
and enjoy Him forever in heaven hereafter. 

How needful is the lesson! The form which our 
prayers tend , to take is that poor bargaining of the 
imperfect patriarch : '' If Thou wilt give me bread to 
eat and raiment to put on, then shall the Lord be my 
God." But ultimately this is as much an earthly 
prayer as the '' O Allah, give me a hundred sequins ; 
just a hundred sequins," of the poor Mahometan. 
The only petition in the Lord's Prayer with which 
the carnal mind has much affinity is '' Give me my 
daily bread"; and even that it despises as scanty 
and insufficient. It is ever pestering God with selfish 
and unseemly desires, which are of the earth earthy. 
We are like worthless vagrants, bursting with our 
coarse mendicancy into the presence of a king. 
Christ discourages this kind of beggary because it 



HALLOWED BE THY NAME. 43 

soon becomes the degradation of all prayer. It is 
not of course that we have no need of daily bread : 
our Heavenly Father knows that we have : Christ 
Himself encourages us to ask for it in due place and 
measure; but He says: '' Seek ye first the kingdom 
of God and His righteousness, and all these things 
shall be added unto you." He utterly discounte- 
nances the putting of our miserable selves and our own 
mean desires into the forefront. He would teach us 
that our shivering egotism and small individuality is 
not to be the pivot of the universe. The day was 
when men held the geocentric theory of the solar 
system, and thought that the heaven with all its 
starry multitudes revolved round our atom- earth. • 
Christ teaches us that the moral order, like the phys- 
ical, is not geocentric, but heliocentric; that it rolls 
round Himself as the Risen Sun of righteousness. 

If we do not follow this method and principle of 
Christ, our prayers will first degenerate into mere 
clamor for drossy gains and inch-high advancements, 
and next we shall become full of hatred of the God 
who, for our own sakes, may refuse us these paltry 
and dubious boons ; — just as the Breton peasant 
flogs the image of his saint who has not granted him 
a good crop; or just as our poor passionate king, 
Henry 11. , with infinite blasphemy, when he had lost 
the town of Le Mans, hurled at God his frenzied 
curse : *' Since Thou hast taken from me the town I 
loved best, where I was born and where my father 
lies buried, I will have my revenge on Thee too; I 



44 THE LORD'S PRAYER, 

will rob Thee of that thing Thou lovest most in me." 
Ah ! if we would only remember the principle that to 
become and not to get should be more the motive of 
our prayers, that the true tone of prayer is the *' Hal- 
lowed be Thy name " of the adoring child, not the 
" Give, give " of the daughters of the horse-leech — 
neither our prayers nor our lives would be so poor. 

But even if we do not besiege high heaven with 
mere selfish mendicancy, many would at least think 
that no petition could, without conventionality, take 
precedence of ''Forgive us our trespasses." It is a 
right, a most necessary petition ; yet even that peti- 
tion may only be selfishness under another form : the 
selfishness of remorse and terror; selfishness still — 
even if it be expanded to infinitude. And this too 
has its own deplorable results. Nearly all the cor- 
ruptions of religion — nearly all that has made religion 
ruthless and revolting ; all the dehumanized squalor 
of self-torture, whether of the Indian yogi or the 
Christian eremite ; all the thrice-accursed infamies of 
the Confessional and the Inquisition; all the horrors 
of religious madness and blind fanaticism ; all the 
aberrations of an apostate theology have come from 
this exclusive thrusting into prominence of the relig- 
ion of selfish fear. It should be cast out by the spirit 
of love, because fear hath torment. There are things 
which loom larger in the noble mind even than indi- 
vidual salvation ; like Paul's *' I could wish myself 
accursed from God for my brethren's sake " ; or even 
Danton's ''Que vion noni soit flctri, ponrim qtie la 



HALLOWED BE THY NAME. 45 

France soit librey God would have us come to Him 
first as a Father : He would have us love Him. All 
else follows that. 

We read how the French boy at Ratisbon rode up 
exultingly to Napoleon's side, and told him that the 
victory was won. The chief's eye brightened. *' But 
you are wounded, my boy," he said. '' Killed, sire ! " 
said the youth, and dropped down dead. The noble- 
ness of the story lies in the boy's self-forgetfulness. 
We read how the swift runner Pheidippides, who 
bore to Athens the news of Marathon, sank dead on 
the first threshold with the words on his lips, Xaipete 
xai Xaipo{i£V — ''Rejoice ye! we too rejoice." In 
these fine instances individuality was lost in patriot- 
ism. Patriotism is noble, because it rises above the 
narrow little selfishnesses of the individual. Which 
of us, at this moment, does not feel something of that 
spirit, as in these anxious days we pray : 

" O God, stretch forth Thy mighty hand, 
And guide and save our fatherland!" 

But there can be no true love of our country apart 
from a love of the supreme goodness. Christ would 
have us merge all earthly desires in adoration, and 
be lost in the infinite ocean of God's love. 

That fiery patriotism of the French camp is intrin- 
sically nobler than the revolting religionism of the 
Spanish cloister. Oh that we felt all this more ; that 
we were sufficiently noble to feel it more ! The early 
Christians felt it when even on their dim graves in 



46 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

the Catacombs they sketched the deer, as though 
they would say : ''As the hart panteth after the water 
brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God. My 
soul is athirst for God; yea, even for the living God! 
When shall I come and appear before God?" 

How much, then, should we thank God that this 
high petition is so divinely, so splendidly unlike even 
what, in our selfish ignorance, we might have taken 
for our better prayers! It teaches us that we are 
nothing, that God is all in all; it teaches us to He 
still in the hght of God's countenance ; to be content 
sometimes merely to bask in the sunshine of His love. 

It is told of one of the best saints of the Middle 
Ages, St. Thomas of Aquino, that when Christ ap- 
peared to him in a vision and said, ''Bene scripsisti 
de me, Thoina ; qtiavi viercedem accipiesf the rapt 
saint answered, '' Non aliam nisi Te, Domine " ('* No 
other gift than Thyself, O Lord"). Ah! how does 
the world become nothing to them to whom God is 
all! 

St. Theresa once dreamed she saw an angel who 
had in one hand a curtain and in the other a shell of 
water, and he said that he meant to hide heaven and 
quench hell, that men might learn to love God for 
Himself alone. Certainly our prayers are worth 
nothing unless the one which takes the precedence 
of them all is : '' Teach me to do the thing that 
pleaseth Thee, for Thou art my God. Let Thy 
loving Spirit lead me into the land of righteousness." 
And that prayer is but another form of *' Hallowed 



HALLOWED BE THY NAME. 47 

be Thy name " ; it is an emptying of self that we may 
be filled with all the fulness of God. Yea, it is Christ's 
beatitude : '' Blessed are they that hunger and thirst 
after righteousness, for they shall be filled." 

So far then, brethren, as to the nature of the peti- 
tion and the rich lessons which its place in the prayer 
may teach us. But now we must try to see more 
nearly what the petition actually means. 

I. ''Hallowed be Thy name'' His name is Him- 
self, as He is made known to us. The name of God 
differentiates Him from all other beings, as men are 
by their names one from another; and nothing is 
more essential than that we should understand this 
name, for it were almost better not to think of God 
at all than to think of Him wrongly and ignobly. 
Every cruel superstition which has debased mankind 
has had its origin in unworthy thoughts of God, and 
primarily in making man — man as he now is — the 
measure and model of God, instead of understanding 
that it is only spiritual man, man as he should be, 
who is made in His image, after His likeness. 

No chapter in the history of mankind is more 
deplorable than that which shows how utterly they 
have failed to feel after Him and find Him. There 
is hardly an age, hardly a nation, in which men have 
not dishallowed God's name by setting up for them- 
selves the grossest travesties of God. Deifying their 
own hearts' lusts, they have imagined gods polluted 
and lascivious as themselves, whose worship was 
infamy. Deifying their own hatred and fear, they 



48 THE LORD'S PRAYER, 

have made God a monster of ruthlessness and blood. 
Deifying their own unbelief, they have spoken of 
God as did the sceptics of the Old Testament, 
"Tush! Thou God carest not for it; " or imagined 
Him like the gods of Epicurus, who '' sate beside 
their nectar, careless of mankind." Deifying their 
own formalism, priests and Pharisees have imagined 
a God as petty as themsehes, troubling Himself w4th 
the threads and tassels and the colors of phylac- 
teries, till, in their devotion to these imbecilities, they 
could neglect righteousness and justice, and crucify 
the Son whom He sent. 

They have been polytheists, worshipping many 
gods; or atheists, denying any god; or ditheists, 
believing in a good and an evil god; or pantheists, 
believing that everything is God. And every one 
of these deadly errors has had its analogue during 
long centuries of erring Christianit}^ There was httle 
to choose between the Moloch of the Valley of Hinnom 
and the Moloch of black- robed monks and sacerdotal 
Inquisitors at the loathly auto-da-fc of Seville, or the 
accursed stakes of Smithfield and Oxford. Insane 
religions have set God forth as an insatiable avenger, 
and even Art has degraded the meek and loving 
Saviour of the world into a tumultuous and wrathful 
Hercules, hurling millions into endless flames. More 
than one sweet saint of God has been driven to say 
to his raging opponents, " Your god is my devil." 

There is Httle, again, to choose between the care- 
less gods of Epicurus and the easy indifferentist who 



HALLOWED BE THY NAME. 49 

has dwindled into a mere phantom of good-nature, 
until the sensuous and unbelieving Frenchman begins 
to talk of " le bon Dieu " in an accent of indulgent 
patronage. Such insolences, such aberrations, show 
us how true it is of almost all men — ''Thou thought- 
est wickedly that I w^as even such an one as thyself." 

How infinitely necessary, then, is this prayer in 
the forefront of all prayer, *' Hallowed be Thy name " ! 
Upon the thoughts we think of God it depends 
whether our religion uplifts our Hfe, or our life 
degrades our religion, and smites with the leprosy 
of selfishness or of superstition even our most holy 
things. 

2. But how is God's name to be made holy? It 
is hallowed by all His works, except by devils and 
by man. It is hallowed by all inanimate things — 
'' Fire and hail, snow and vapor, wind and storm 
fulfilling God's word." It is hallowed by all the 
creatures of His hand in their multitudinous Bene- 
dicite. It is hallowed by Angels and Cherubim and 
Seraphim, and all the primal children of His love. 
It is hallowed by His redeemed saints, / 

" With those just spirits that wear victorious palms, 
Hymns devout and holy psalms 
Singing everlastingly." 

But is it hallowed by ourselves? "As He that 
called you is holy," says St. Peter, ''so be ye holy 
in all manner of conversation." We should hallow 
His name by utter humility in His presence, for " to 



50 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

Him belongeth righteousness, to us confusion of face." 
We should hallow it by noble thoughts of Him, and 
by giving thanks for the remembrance of His holiness. 
We should hallow it most of all by living hves kind 
and pure, honest and truthful, obedient and contented. 
And then hallowing it ourselves, we should strive that 
it be hallowed by others also. Alas 1 who can look 
on the world, even on the nominally Christian world 
around him, even on the Church itself as represented 
by its so-called organs of opinion, and say that it is 
hallowed? God bids us worship Him exclusively, 
and our hearts are full of idols. He bids us honor 
Him by being meek and lowly and unselfish, and 
men are lovers of their own selves, covetous, boastful, 
proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthank- 
ful, unholy, implacable, haters of good, traitors, heady, 
high-minded, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of 
God. Alas, alas ! how, then, shall His name be hal- 
lowed by our petty formalities, by our unclean lips, 
by our slanderous tongues, by our unworthy lives? 
Ah ! it is because we fail so utterly that we pray to 
God to do what neither His world nor His Church, 
save most inadequately, has done. 

*' Father, glorify Thy name," prayed the Lord 
Jesus ; and the answer came, '' I have both glorified 
it, and will glorify it again." Yea, in spite of His 
world and of His Church He has glorified His name. 
He hallowed it of old by His covenant and His prom- 
ise ; by the lives of His patriarchs; by the burning 
passion of His prophets; by here and there a holy 



HALLOWED BE THY NAME. 5 I 

king ; by now and then a holy priest. He has hal- 
lowed it above all by the sinlessness of the Son of 
His love, " the firstborn of many brethren, the Prince 
of all the kings of the earth." He has hallowed it 
by the outpouring of His Spirit with rushing wind 
and parted flames, or descending as the soft dew on 
holy hearts. He has hallowed it in many a happy 
baptism ; in many a blessed communion ; by making 
His men and women pure and loving, and sending 
them like white- winged angels into the dark places 
of the world. He will hallow it in our Church, in 
our land, in our hearts, if with all our hearts we truly 
seek Him. 

It is in vain to tell the world, which knows Him 
not, that His name must be hallowed, unless we show 
Him that even by such as we it has been, it can be 
hallowed, and this is the meaning of the lives of all 
His saints. They too were ** taken out of the same 
lump of polluted nature with ourselves " ; but as the 
gem is dull and black in the darkness, but glows and 
burns and palpitates, restless with living splendor, 
when it drinks the sunbeam, so our poor souls, dull 
as they are and base with sin, may be transfigured 
into glory and loveliness, if, emptied of their lusts 
and selfishness, they lay themselves wholly bare to 
receive the effluence of God ; if, forgetting all their 
sins and shames, they pour forth to the God of their 
life the one supreme petition, " Hallowed be Thy 
name." 



THY KINGDOM COME, 



53 



Thy kingdom come. 

St. Matthew vi. lo. 

LET US try to understand to-day some fraction of 
the significance of this clause. We have heard 
in the preface — "Our Father which art in heaven" 
— the keynotes of reverent adoration and loving trust- 
fulness ; we have seen that by the first prayer, '^ Hal= 
lowed be Thy name," Christ would fain exorcise in 
us the demon of worldly and even of religious selfish- 
ness, uplifting us to see a vision of all things in God, 
inviting us to open all our hearts to His transfiguring 
and inspiring effluence. 

This second petition points to new spheres of life 
and duty. It is, as we shall see, no vague aspiration, 
but a daily and awakening trumpet-call to action, a 
divine finger pointing to what should be the very 
course and object of all our lives. 

We hear in these days a great deal about " the 
Church," and many attach to it a narrow meaning, 
and put it in a false perspective. They exclude from 
it all but their own special organization ; they make 
the door of it bristle with anathemas; they employ 
it, not as a bond of holy union, but as a war-cry of 
arrogant separation. But the word " Church " on 

55 



56 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

the lips of Christ and in the formularies of the 
Church of England means only the blessed company 
of all faithful people. Our Lord used the word but 
once of the Church in general. He spoke habitually, 
not of the Church, but of the Kingdom of God. 

That was the dominant word of His Gospel. If 
you would form any clear conception of what He 
meant by it, study again the Sermon on the Mount. 
That was Christ's description of the Kingdom of God, 
the sphere of God's rule, in contradistinction to that 
present order of things which does not set forth His 
glory; — the Kingdom of Heaven in contradistinction 
from this world so far as it is under the malign influ- 
ence of that evil spirit to whom St. Paul gives the 
terrible title of *' the god of this world." In that 
great proclamation Christ sets forth the character of 
the citizens of the kingdom : not arrogant, railing, 
exclusive, popular, but meek, merciful, peaceful, and 
persecuted. He sets forth their influence, — not to 
harm but to preserve, not to condemn but to recon- 
cile, not to destroy but to edify. He describes their 
new life of prayer and self-denial, their treasure, their 
service, their repose, their charity. And in His many 
parables He set forth the purely spiritual character 
of this kingdom : its joyousness as of a king's feast, 
its secret growth, its mingled aspect, its divine inward- 
ness, the necessity for its acceptance, not of this or 
that opinion or this or that form, but of the moral 
obedience, the gentle dociHty, the sweet innocency 
of a little child. 



THY KINGDOM COME, 57 

By the Kingdom of God, then, is not meant here 
His rule in the material universe. That, too, needs 
restoration, needs the Palingenesia, the restitution of 
all things. *' Everything seems to have a crack in 
it." '' Something is wrong; there needeth a change." 
God is no indifferent God of Epicurus, looking down 
as at a comedy on all the trials, all the miseries, all 
the conflagrations and catastrophes which desolate 
and terrify our mortal life. Think of the sad tidings 
which we hear from time to time. Think of the 
steamboat on the glassy lake, with its happy passen- 
gers, suddenly transformed into a scene of agony, of 
death. Think of the tropical island, rent, shattered, 
overwhelmed, by the sulphurous furies of earthquake 
and eclipse. Think of the volcano bursting its fetters 
to roll down on smiHng fields its molten lava and 
scalding deluges and stones of fire. Think of the 
ghastly spectre of famine stalking over the plains of 
Russia. Think of the pestilence which walketh in 
darkness, and has reached the shores of Europe. 
Think of that capital of our oldest colony laid in 
ruins by the devouring flames. Think of the lovely 
Swiss village half overwhelmed, half swept away by 
the rushing of the avalanche and the flood of the 
dammed-up mountain stream. Think of the troubles 
in Uganda, the fierce labor battles of Pittsburg, the 
anarchists of France. The air of the world is tremu- 
lous with anguish ; but the cry of millions of broken 
or aching hearts enters not in vain into the ears of the 
Lord God of Sabaoth. 



58 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

We are saved by hope. The whole creation groan- 
eth and travaileth in pain together until now, but it 
awaits its redemption. That blessed day shall come, 
foretold by the prophet, when '' they shall not hurt 
nor destroy in all My holy mountain, for the earth 
shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the 
waters cover the sea." In that day, instead of Chris- 
tian populations ruinously armed to the teeth one 
against another, nation shall not rise up against nation, 
neither shall they learn war any more. In this sense, 
too, the universe shall be restored, and the kingdoms 
of the world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord 
and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and 
ever. 

" And for this pray we, 

ISIay Thy kingdom's peace 
Come unto us ; for we, unless it come, 
With all our striving, thither tend in vain." 

If we are to further it, it must come first in our own 
hearts, mortifying and killing all vices in us. 

This prayer, then, is all-embracing in its blessed \ 
amplitude. *'We pray," says Maurice, ''that the 
King of kings and Lord of lords will reign over our 
spirits and souls and bodies which He has redeemed. 
We pray for the extinction of all tyranny, whether iny 
men or in multitudes ; for the exposure and destruc- 
tion of corruptions, outward and inward; for truth 
and righteousness in all departments of government, 
art, science ; for the dignity of professions ; for the 
banishment from trade of every form of fraud and 



THY KINGDOM COME. 59 

chicanery ; for blessings which shall be the purifi- 
cation, not only of every palace, but of every hovel. 
We pray for these things, knowing that we are pray- 
ing according to God's will; knowing that He will 
hear us." 

*' If He had not heard this prayer, going up from 
tens of thousands in all ages, the earth would have 
been a den of robbers. He will so answer it that all 
which He has made shall become as it was when He 
beheld it on the seventh day, and lo! it was very 
good." 

We shall be little likely to pray the prayer aright 
if we do not feel with self-abasement how far we are 
from its realization. Look at the world. I know 
nothing more paralyzing than a callous acquiescence 
in the state of things around us. A divine dis- 
content, a passionate dissatisfaction, leading to ever- 
increased efforts is far better than this lazy sloth. 
When I stand face to face with the condition of things, 
I will not say in Dahomey, or Ashantee, or among 
the slave-drivers of Africa, or the heathen millions of 
Asia, or among those two-thirds of the human race 
who still dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, 
but here in Christian England, here in London, here 
in Westminster, not a stone's-throw from the Abbey 
and the Houses of Parliament; when I see, not 
merely the crime, the vice, and the degradation, but 
the mere passive godlessness all around us, I am as 
far as possible from sharing in the soft murmurs of 
mutual admiration whether in the Church or in the 



60 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

world. Faith, indeed, prevents me from saying with 
the poet — 

" Oh, never sin, and want and woe this earth shall leave," 

but when I know that the streets are haunted by 
thousands who in their misery turn womanhood to 
loathHness, and affix on the shameful selfishness of 
manhood a yet deeper stain ; when I witness the 
curse to which betting and gambling lead, and not 
only see it at work among swindlers and blacklegs, but 
seizing all classes down to the lowest with the fury 
of an epidemic, and not yet utterly discountenanced 
by every honest man ; when I see, almost every day, 
in almost every newspaper, some fresh instance of 
brutal violence breaking out amid the plague-spot of 
squalor, which arises immediately from the traffic in 
drink ; when I watch the greed of Mammon- worship, 
dead to every duty in the attempt to load itself with 
the thick clay of superfluous wealth; when I read 
of the ever-increasing ostentation of luxury among 
the rich, and the ever- deepening misery of struggle 
among the poor — I think that, instead of trumpeting 
all that we do, it would become us more to put sack- 
cloth upon our loins and sit in dust and ashes for all 
we leave undone. 

Nor does it comfort me much to look at the nomi- 
nal Church. Better for us to consider our unprofit- 
ableness than our merits. I see the same injustice, 
even deeper maHce, in her religious journals. I see 
her animated by party animosities. I see her lapsing 



THY KINGDOM COME. 6 1 

on every side into Romanism in all but name. I see 
but few saints among her professors, though I hear 
the name of saint bandied among one another by her 
partisans. In her ideal the King's daughter is all 
glorious within — in vestitu attrato^ circinndata varie- 
tatihts; in her reality I see much that needs the 
awful warning of Him who standeth in the midst of 
the seven golden candlesticks. I see her losing her 
hold on the upper classes, who are growing indifferent 
to her Sabbaths and her ordinances; I see her pro- 
ducing little effect on the working classes, not ten per 
cent, of whom attend her services ; I see her stand- 
ing with weak hands and feeble knees in the great 
battle against the master-fiend of drink, or even sid- 
ing with his champions and palliating his intolerable 
enormities. 

Let others say smooth things and prophesy de- 
ceits ; let others, if they will, daub tottering walls 
with untempered mortar. I will not. They who dare 
to speak the truth must learn never to quail before 
the hatred which comes from the supporters of vice 
and the votaries of error. I believe that, if Paul were 
to come now, he would say very plainly to the Church 
of England about many things which prevail in her 
midst, ** Shall I praise you for these things? I praise 
you not." One of the best poets of this generation 
sang how our Lord came to earth once more, and felt 
wroth and ill at ease in our pompous services when 
He looked into the salt sea of tears and misery out- 
side; and one of the noblest laymen of this age, 



62 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

General Gordon, said that, if Christ came again, we 
should, if not crucify, at least overwhelm Him with 
sneers and innuendoes, as we do His servants, and as 
did our predecessors the priests and Pharisees of old. 

Ah ! when God's '' infinite and fiery finger shrivels 
the falsehoods from the souls of men," He will have 
many to shrivel from ours ; and when He whose eyes 
are as a flame of fire looks upon the utter unworthi- 
ness of what so many vaunt as though it were ade- 
quate service, it will have to burn much chaff, and to 
melt much dross, in His Church, and in every one of 
us who call ourselves its members. 

Now this prayer is, as I said, a trumpet-call to 
awakenment and to action ; for if we pray ''Thy king- 
dom come," that is a monstrous hypocrisy if wx are, 
every day of our lives, hindering and thwarting the 
advance of that kingdom ; it is an hypocrisy if we 
are indifferent to all its laws and all its interests. 
It is only a reality if, with however many imperfec- 
tions, however feebly, however unworthily, we are yet 
endeavoring sincerely, to the clearest of our lights, to 
the best of our powers, to prepare the throne of that 
kingdom, to make straight paths for its advancing 
chariot in our hearts and in the world. 

''Thy kingdom come'' Is it not as the voice of 
the archangel and the trump of God to every man 
whose Hfe is a lie ; whose trade is a curse to his fel- 
low-men ; whose profession is full of cheating and 
dishonesty? to every man who, by the base indul- 
gence of his evil passions, drags down human souls 



THY KINGDOM COME. (^^ 

to hell; to every man who, by his pen and by his 
tongue, pours out constantly the wine of dragons and 
the poison of asps ; to every man who is dishonoring 
and defying the law of God ; to every idolater, swearer. 
Sabbath-breaker, dishonorer of his parents ; to every 
" whoremonger and idolater, and whosoever loveth 
and maketh a lie " ? 

How can they pray, or mean anything when they 
pray, ** Thy kingdom come " ? They despise its ordi- 
nances. They defy its laws. They persecute its 
subjects. They violate its principles. They put 
stumbling-blocks in the path of its development. 
They are the enemies of the cross of Christ, whose 
god is their belly, whose glory is in their shame, who 
mind earthly things. They are thwarting the blessed 
order which might even now prevail in the world, 
and which shall prevail at last; and let this prayer 
warn them that he that stumbleth against this stone 
shall be broken, but on whomsoever it shall fall it 
shall grind him to powder. 

But myriads more, who are not active foes of 
Christ's kingdom, yet are in no sense of the word its 
upholders. How can they pray this prayer who aim 
no higher than slothful contentment with the life of 
the animal, — the multitudes who eat, and drink, 
and sleep, and live in self-indulgent comfort, but 
have yet never struck one blow, never lifted one 
finger, never suffered one loss, never dared even to 
brave one taunt for the cause of God, nor can show 
one scar of a single wound in even the lightest of 



64 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

His battles? If we pray *' Thy kingdom come," we 
are bound to fight for it and fight hard ; to strike for 
it and strike home ; to wrestle mightily, and shoulder 
to shoulder, and at all costs, against the corruption 
of its truth and the adversaries of its holiness ! 

How many of us dare to do this ? Dare to stand 
alone ? Dare to strike out against the stream ? Dare 
to take up our cross and follow Christ, doing the 
hard deed and speaking the difficult word, while we 
walk after Him weeping, and with aching heart and 
bleeding feet? How many of us are doing any one 
self-denying thing to promote Christ's kingdom? 
Why, even if a youth or a girl does but teach in a 
Sunday-school, or look after the needs of a few poor; 
even if a man, doing absolutely nothing else, and 
ashamedly conscious that he does nothing else, at 
least gives something more than sham driblets of his 
superfluity to Christ's suffering little ones; they do 
Httle indeed, but still something. How many of you 
can honestly say that you are doing even so much as 
this? How many of us in God's sight are in reality 
doing anything except living and dying for ourselves ? 

Well, then, let this prayer arouse us! You who 
are young, you the scholars in Westminster School, 
and the children of the choir, and all the many 
young men who hear me, am I setting before you an 
easy or a pleasant task? No! A happy one and a 
noble, the only happy, the only noble, but not easy, 
not pleasant. You pray "Thy kingdom come." If 



THY KINGDOM COME. 65 

you mean to be, as you are sworn to be, its soldiers 
and servants, you will find it no easy task even to 
conquer your own evil passions ; no easy task, but a 
warfare in which there is no discharge, to secure a 
tranquil possession of yourselves. 

And when this is done, there remains the task of 
fighting God's battles, in a nominal Church and a 
wicked world. If you love ease, sloth, money, pro- 
motion, the praise of men at the cost of duty and 
conscience, take them and find the curse and slow 
death and degradation of the choice; what Christ 
offers you is the hundredfold, indeed, but therewith 
persecution and the cross. The basest advice I could 
give you would be to shun opposition, and creep and 
crawl behind the dominant multitude and the domi- 
nant theology, and answer men according to their 
idols, and omnia serviliter pro imperio. The advice 
I do give you is, since death is near, and God is 
eternal, scorn to fear or truckle to the wicked or to 
the many ; do not mind what they say or what they 
think, but do your duty ; and in doing it, when it is 
hard and painful, still set your faces like a flint to 
do it. 

I read the other day of a young Indian officer, who, 
shocked at many evils which he saw around him, began 
to protest against them, and at once wakened all round 
himself the hornet swarms of hatred and slander. He 
went in distress to the gallant Outram, the Bayard of 
India, who Hes buried in yonder nave. " What am I 



66 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

to do amid this storm of calumny ? " he asked in deep 
distress. Other men might have bidden him to tem- 
porize, to bend to the hurricane, to hold his tongue 
and acquiesce, and get on, and be happy, as the flesh 
counts happiness, and successful as the world counts 
success. How many are there who thus palter with 
Eternal God for money or for advancement! But 
Outram happily was a man who felt the infinite na- 
ture of duty ; and Outram asked the youth : '' Do 
you fear God or man? If you fear God, do as you 
are doing, and bear the insults that are heaped upon 
you. If you fear man and the mess, let everything 
go on as it is and make no protest." 

Even so, if you mean the prayer " Thy kingdom 
come," act up to it. Do the little every-day duties 
now, and daily, and strenuously, and sincerely ; so 
you will promote that kingdom most effectually, and 
the great duties will come to you if God wills. Be 
it uncertain of issue, be it difficult of performance, be 
its consequences full of pain, still stick to duty, for 
duty alone is victorious and eternal. 

If I am to say a word to you, for whom this will 
be the last Sunday of school life, let me tell you this 
story. In one of the battles during the American 
Civil War, a young officer stood at a battery which 
had dwindled down to a single gun. That single 
gun he loaded again and again, and fired it into the 
thick darkness with an aim that had been given him 
in the light. At last the bugles rang out the victory 
of his army ; and, said he, '' Then I knew that what- 



THY KINGDOM COME. 6/ 

ever others did, for me a victory meant keeping my 
own gun loaded and fired." Work in that spirit. 
Remember that " in God's war slackness is infamy," 
and in your lives or on your lips there shall be power 
and healing in the prayer *'Thy kingdom come." 



THY WILL BE DONE, 



Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth. 

St. Matthew vi. lo. 

IN one sense the prayer is needless. In nature, 
in Providence, in the great issues of life, God's 
will must be done, cannot but be done, for " who 
hath resisted His will"? Who can interfere with 
His infinite, uniform, passionless, material forces? 
Can we stay the march of the tidal wave? Can we 
prevent the desolating rush of the tornado? Can 
we bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades or loose 
the bands of Orion? 

No ! Nor can we alter the divine issues of earthly 
events. No tumultuous furies of human passion, no 
volcanic outbursts of wrath and revolution, change 
the eternal, inscrutable purpose ; nay, they do but 
help as the blind instruments for its accomplishment. 
The Psalms and Prophets are full of this thought. 
God sitteth above the water-floods, and God remain- 
eth a king forever. God turns to His own praise 
the fierceness of men and the madness of the people. 
Man thinks evil ; God overrules it to good. 

We find the same fact attested by all pagan expe- 
71 



72 



THE LORD'S PRAYER. 



rience. The most ancient of the mighty songs of 
Greece, the ''Iliad" of Homer, begins with the 
words : 

"Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring 
Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing! 
That wrath which hurled to Pluto's gloomy reign 
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain, 
Whose limbs unburied on the naked shore, 
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore, 
Since great Achilles and Atrides strove. 
Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove!" 

But the English poet, in his translation, has lost the 
grandeur of the original. It is not merely that " such 
was the will of Zeus," but " and the purpose of Zeus 
was all along being accomplished." 

Were it our immediate subject it might be a mat- 
ter of interest to illustrate this thought from the wis- 
dom of ancient and modern times. Let one Eastern 
myth suffice. Arabian legend tells us how once King 
Solomon and his Grand Vizier stood at the top of 
a mighty flight of steps which led to the loftiest plat- 
form of the Temple, and, as they stood there, the 
Vizier saw a man, who had been passing, suddenly 
pause, cast one glance upwards at him, and begin to 
mount the steps. In that one glance the terrified 
Vizier recognized the awful features of Azrael, the 
Angel of Death, and fearing that Azrael's mission 
was to him he implored Solomon to lend him his 
magic carpet. The King assented, and the Vizier 
wished himself transported at once on the magic 



THY WILL BE DONE 73 

carpet to the highest peak of Caucasus. Slowly, 
with downward gaze, the Angel mounted the steps ; 
and when he found Solomon standing there alone he 
said, '' O King, I glanced at thy Vizier only because, 
being bidden to summon his soul from Caucasus, I 
saw him standing here with thee." ''Angel, " an- 
swered the King, '' even now he awaits thee on the 
summit of Caucasus." Thus doth man ever fulfil 
his destiny in the effort to avoid it; and not men 
only, but nations. 

With what force is this expressed by the early 
disciples, in that outburst of inspired rapture : ** Lord, 
that didst make the heaven, and the earth, and the 
sea, and all that in them is. ... Of a truth, against 
Thy holy servant Jesus both Herod and Pontius 
Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, 
are gathered together." With what result? To 
crucify the Son of God? Yes! but even in that 
stupendous act of rebelHon, not to defeat the will of 
God, but only to carry out the immeasurable merci- 
fulness of His decree ; only " to do whatsoever Thy 
hand and Thy counsel foreordained to come to pass."^ 
Yes ! in that quiet light, *' wherein God shows all 
things in the slow history of their ripening," God's 
will is the inmost and ultimate harmony of the world ; 
" all things, both in heaven and earth, do it homage, 
the very least as feeling its care, and the greatest as 
not exempted from its power; " and rebel man, be 
he a Pharaoh, or a Sennacherib, or a Nebuchadrezzar, 
or a Diocletian, is never more absolutely the play- 



74 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

thing and instrument of God's decrees than when his 
rebellion is most frantic and most determined. 

But though in nature and the issues of destiny 
God's will is always done, there is another and ter- 
ribly real sense in which the will of God is not done. 
I do not need to prove this. We have but to look 
in the world ; we have but to look in our own hearts. 
In the world what is the meaning of all this want and 
misery ? all this violence and sin and shame ? all these 
lives so grievously wasted? all these faces on which 
God's image is so deplorably defaced? all this *' insane 
religion, degraded art, merciless war, sullen toil, de- 
testable pleasure, and vain and vile hope in which 
the nations of the world have lived since first they 
bear record of themselves " ? What is the meaning 
of all the millions who eat and drink, and indulge 
their bad passions, and make the world viler, not 
better ; of all whose whole lives have been but one 
long living death, and who have nothing to give back 
to God but the dust of diseased bodies, and the ca- 
tastrophe of shipwrecked souls ? Look at the annals 
even of Christian Churches. If we were to speak 
plain truth, not specious and conventional falsities, do 
we not see how much arrogance, how much formalism, 
how many fierce antagonisms, have mingled with 
their history? Consider the execrable intolerance, 
the usurping apostasies, the persecution of God's 
best saints, the apathetic attitude towards iniquities 
at home, the inadequate realization of vast responsi- 
bility to the heathen world abroad, which have marred 



THY WILL BE DONE. . 75 

the work and glory of the Christian Churches. Look 
into our own hearts! Which of us does not daily 
and grievously do that which we ought not to have 
done, and leave undone that which we ought to 
do? 

Let me take but one frightful instance in which, 
by the mystery of our free will and its resultant 
choice of sin, the will of God is terribly thwarted. 
** It is not the will of your Father in heaven," said 
Christ, ''that one of these little ones should perish." 
Ah ! do they not perish in millions ? Think of the 
physical degradation ; think of the moral waste ! 
Every year hundreds of little children in England 
alone are overlain by drunken mothers, and most of 
these on Saturday nights, when the worst work is 
done by the vile god of our national faithlessness. 
Every year thousands of little English children die 
poisoned by the taint in the vitiated blood of their 
parents. But the perishing is far deadlier in those 
who grow up in the gutter and the slum, in our drink- 
and-greed- created hotbeds for the breeding among 
us of harlotry and crime. And oh ! what a frightful 
perishing it is! How black, how leprous do the 
souls become which might have been so fair and 
innocent ! \ 

A story is told of a painter who saw a child so 
perfect in his beauty that he painted him, and said 
that if ever he found a face as vile as that face was 
angelic, he would paint that as a pendant to it. Years 
passed, and he had not seen a face so absolute in its 



76 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

degradation as that child's in his lovehness. But one 
day he visited a prison, and there saw a felon, still 
young, but with a face almost devihsh in its vicious 
demoralization. He painted this wretched prisoner, 
and while painting him found, with appalled imagi- 
nation, that this man was that lovely child, as drink, 
and lust, and greed, and hate had made him; and 
the two pictures, it is said, hang side by side in some 
Italian gallery. But the awful tale they tell is a tale 
of every day, and in all these cases the holy will of 
God is not done, but is resisted by the fraud and 
malice of the devil and of man. 

" God made the living soul; 
The ruined creature is the \vork of man." 

We see, then, the deep need for this prayer, '' Thy 
will be done." Do not think that it is a mere verbal 
variation of the two previous petitions. The prayer, 
*' Hallowed be Thy name," invites us to think less 
of self, more of God ; to think but little of self, but 
to let our souls bathe in the dew of God's grace as in 
the fountains of the eternal dawn. The prayer, " Thy 
kingdom come," is an awakening trumpet-call to ac- 
tion, pledging us, unless we make our prayer the 
prayer of hypocrites, to the furtherance of that king- 
dom. 

This prayer is an appeal to give up our own wills 
altogether — 

" Our wills are ours, we know not why, 
Our wills are ours to make them Thine :" 



THY WILL BE DONE. 



n 



and it also sets before us an example as to how we 
should do it. The clause " as in heaven so on earth " 
belongs not to this one petition, but to all three. 

The prayer, then, forces us to ask four questions, 
on which depends its sincere and intelligent utterance. 
What is God's will ? By whom is it done in heaven ? 
How do they do it ? What is the end at which the 
petition aims? 

1. On the first question we need not linger. Scrip- 
ture answers it plainly and decisively. ** This is the 
will of God," it says, '' even your sanctification." 
The good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God 
is that we should not Hve in the flesh, to the lusts of 
men, but that we should keep God's commandments. 
God's will is that we should do justly, and love mercy, 
and walk humbly with our God. 

2. The second question is, By whom is it done in 
heaven? There is no reference here, as some have 
fancied, to the stars in their courses, to the moon 
walking in brightness, and the sun going forth as a 
bridegroom from his eastern chambers. Most true 
it is that though they have no speech or language, 
yet they declare the glory of God. But the allusion 
is to the angelic host of heaven; to the burning 
Cherubim which uphold the chariot of God, and 
flash hither and thither at His will ; to the shining 
Seraphini, veiled with their six wings, crying, " Holy, 
holy, holy," through the altar incense; to the Morn- 
ing Stars who at the creation sang together, and all 
the Sons of God shouted for joy. These, we are told, 



78 THE LORD'S PRAYER, 

keep His commandments, hearkening unto the voice 
of His word. 

Scripture is full of their ministration. They rejoice, 
they weep, they sing ; they do wondrously, ascending 
in flame to heaven; they carry souls into Abraham's 
bosom; they encamp around the dwellings of the 
just; they exult over one sinner that repents. Are 
they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister 
for them that shall be heirs of salvation? This, in 
fact, is almost the only thing revealed to us about 
them. '* We know that they are spirits in nature," 
says Donne, the poet-preacher, '' but what the nature 
of a spirit is we know not. We know that they are 
creatures, but whether created with this world or 
long before we know not. They are creatures that 
have not so much of a body as flesh is, as froth is, 
as a vapor is, as a sigh is ; and yet, with a touch, 
they shall moulder a rock into less atoms than the 
sand it stands upon, and a millstone into smaller 
flour than it grinds. They are creatures made, yet 
not a minute older now than when they were first 
made, if they were made before all measure of time 
began ; nor, if they were made in the beginning of 
time, and are now six thousand years old, have they 
one wrinkle of age in their faces, or one sob of weari- 
ness in their lungs. They are primogeniti Dei, God's 
eldest sons, and if we may offencelessly express it so, 
cenigmata divina, the riddles of heaven, the perplex- 
ities of speculation." What is told us respecting them 
is not for the luxury of the imagination, it is for the 



THY WILL BE DONE. 79 

example of our lives. *'As Thine angels make sacri- 
fice to Thee of their own will," pray the humbled 
spirits in Dante, " ever singing Hosanna, so may men 
do with theirs." 

3. These, then, are they by whom God's will is 
done in heaven. How is it done ? Alas ! as diflfer- 
ently as possible from the slack and unwilling way in 
which it is done on earth! God's angels, we know, 
do it contentedly and unquestioningly, whatever it is. 
If it be a mission of seeming wrath, as was theirs 
whose sword of waving flame drove man from Para- 
dise ; or his who met Balaam in the narrow path ; or 
those who in ten thousand times ten thousand flashed 
amid the rolling clouds of Sinai ; or his who burned 
with the lurid light of plague over the threshing-floor 
of Araunah ; or his who spread his wings on the blast 
and slew those thousands in the camp of Assyria ; or 
theirs who carry the seven vials full of the wrath of 
God ; or theirs who thrust their sharp sickles into the 
vine of earth and reap — they know it is a message of 
mercy hidden, no less than when it is such a message 
of mercy manifested, as was his who stayed the knife 
of Abraham upraised to slay his son ; or theirs who 
hurried Lot out of burning Sodom ; or theirs whose 
fiery rapture broke into melodies when Christ was 
born in Bethlehem ; or his who comforted the faint- 
ing Saviour under the moonlight in Gethsemane ; or 
theirs who behold in heaven the face of the Father's 
Httle ones ; or theirs who seize their harps to hymn 
their joy over the sinners who repent. They do 



8o THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

God's work unquestioningly. And they do it cheer- 
fully. 

Man has his insect ambition, his ephemeral distinc- 
tions. To the angels, if it be God's will, it is just 
as dignified to sweep a room as to rule a kingdom. 
When Raphael conducted to Babylonia the boy Tobias 
and his dog, 

" He did God's will; to him all one, 
Or on the earth, or in the sun." 

They feel that 

" God's puppets are we, one and all. 
There is no great or small." 

The Mahometans, who believe many beautiful 
things about angels, have in one chapter of their 
Koran the story how Gabriel, as he waited by the 
gates of gold, was sent by God to earth to do two 
things. One was to prevent King Solomon from the 
sin of forgetting the hour of prayer in exultation over 
his royal steeds ; the other to help a little yellow ant 
on the slope of Ararat, which had grown weary in 
getting food for its nest, and which would otherwise 
perish in the rain. To Gabriel the one behest seemed 
just as kingly as the other, seeing that God had 
ordered it. 

" Silently he left 
The Presence, and prevented the king's sin, 
And holp the little ant at entering in." 

To those myriads of waiting ministrants 



THY WILL BE DONE. 8 1 

" Naught is too high or low. 
Too mean or mighty, if God wills it so ; 
Neither is any creature, great or small, 
Beyond His pity, which embraceth all ; 
Nor any ocean rolls so vast that He 
Forgets one wave of all that restless sea." 



And then they do God's will, not only unquestion- 
ingly, cheerfully, but zealously, swift as the hurricane, 
vividly as the lightning. He maketh His angels 
winds, and His messengers a flaming fire ; and it 
may be true, as one has said, that '' Nature is not 
inanimate; her works are duties"; and that her 
works, so fearful and so beautiful, are wrought by 
the ministries of these great and holy beings, so that 
'' every breath of air and ray of light and heat, every 
beautiful prospect, is, as it were, the skirts of their 
garments and the waving of the robes of those who 
see God in heaven." 

And they do it harmoniously. There are no jeal- 
ousies among the angels ; no cut-throat competi- 
tions ; no base rivalries as to which shall do '' the 
maximum of service on the minimum of grace." They 
do not slander and belittle and intrigue against each 
other. 

" Our life is like a narrow raft 
Afloat upon the hungry sea. 
Whereon is but a little space ; 
And each man, eager for a place. 
Doth thrust his brother in the sea. 
And so the sea is salt with tears, 
And so our life is worn with fears." 



82 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

But among the angels Gabriel does not envy Michael, 
nor Michael vex Gabriel. Raphael rejoices in Uriel's 
sunlike brightness, and Uriel in Raphael's enchanting 
grace. 

It is the characteristic of this world that envy rages 
against merit ; that success awakens antipathy ; but 
it is not so above. When, in the great white rose of 
Paradise, Dante asks '' Whether the spirits in the 
outermost spheres do not long for a higher and 
nearer place?" all the spirits glow into a happy 
smile, and Piccarda tells him that the will of them 
all is so absolutely the will of God that they do not 
dream of desiring anything but what God wills. 
Their lower place pleases them, because it pleases 
Him, and Dante says : 

"Then saw I clearly how each spot in heaven 
Is paradise, though with like gracious dew 
The supreme virtue shower not over all." 

And when we consider all this joyous, unbroken, 
zealous, loving, disinterested service, we see more 
reason to admire the dying meditation of our great 
Richard Hooker, who, when asked on his deathbed 
the subject of his thoughts, answered that, after per- 
ceiving that this hfe was full of perturbations, he was 
meditating the number and nature of the angels, and 
their blessed obedience and order, without which 
peace would not be in heaven; and, ''Oh!" he 
added, " that it might be so on earth!" 

Such, then, is the scope of this petition. Surely, 



THY WILL BE DONE. 83 

when we consider all this, we should find it full of 
deeper and more blessed meaning. But, to conclude, 
as in the case of each petition, the prayer involves a 
pledge ; its utterance implies a duty. Oh, that we 
all felt more those sayings of the old Rabbis : '* The 
day is short, the work abundant, the laborers remiss, 
the reward great, the Master presses;" therefore *' be 
bold as a leopard, swift as an eagle, bounding as a 
stag, brave as a lion, to do the will of thy Father 
which is in heaven." 

We should feel all this the more if we were true 
Christians. The will of God, in these lower regions 
of distortion and perversion, does not work automat- 
ically. It is His will that all work for man should, 
with the help of His grace, be done by man. '' Well, 
God mend all!" said Lord Rea, in 1630. "Nay," 
impatiently exclaimed Sir David Ramsay, *' nay, 
Donald, we must help Him to mend it." 

" God cannot make man's best 
Without best men to help Him." 

Now the quintessence of the will of God and the 
quintessence of the way in which angels do, and men 
should do, God's work is love ; for God is love. And 
this our sweet poet, Edmund Spenser, saw when he 
wrote of the angels : 

" How oft do they their silver bowers leave 
To come to succor us that succor want! 
How oft do they with golden pinions cleave 
The flitting skies like flying pursuivant, 



84 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

Against foul fiends to aid us militant ! 

They for us fight, they watch and duly ward. 
And their bright squadrons round about us plant, 

And all for love, and nothing for reward : 
O why should heavenly God to men have such regard? " 

Yet God has given us a nearer, dearer, truer ex- 
ample even than that of His angels. He has given 
us His Son as a divine and perfect ensample, that we 
should walk in His steps. His life and death are the 
eternal model of how God's work should be done, 
alike on earth and in heaven. For that will is best 
done when we kill in us all the desires of self, and 
lose ourselves in Him. 

In the mighty poem of Dante, the '' Divina Com- 
media," which contains some of the deepest religious 
thought of the Christian world, after the poet has 
been conducted through the lurid abysses of Hell, 
and up the steep mountain terraces of Purgatory, and 
through the Rose of Paradise, he ends with the vision 
of the Triune God. The moral purport and end of 
all that burning revelation to the poet's soul was 
simply to make him see that the will of God is love, 
and to make his will accordant with the love of God. 
Final blessedness for man is reached with the entire 
surrender of his will to the love of God ; and he ends 
the poem with the four lines — 

" Here vigor failed the towering fantasy, 
But now my will rolled onward, like a wheel 
In even motion, by the love impelled 
Which moves the sun in heaven and all the stars." 



THY WILL BE DONE. 85 

This petition, then, expresses that which it is the 
one true purpose of human Hfe to teach. 

" Teach me, my God and King, 
In all things Thee to see, 
And what I do in anything 
To do it as for Thee. 

"A servant with this clause 
Makes drudgery divine; 
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws 
Makes that and the action fine." 



GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY 
BREAD- 



87 



Give us this day our daily bread. 

St. Matthew vi. ii. 

IN preaching on this " epitome of the Gospel," this 
*' pearl of prayers/' my object has been so directly 
practical, that I have not had time for questions of 
criticism. I will only remark, in passing, that in this 
petition there are two slight variations between St. 
Matthew and St. Luke. 

St. Matthew has doc; — " give in one act " ; St. Luke 
has Si5ov — " be giving," " give us continuously." " St. 
Matthew," says Dr. Vaughan, " touches the readi- 
ness, St. Luke the steadiness; St. Matthew the 
promptitude, St. Luke the patience of God's supply." 

Again, St. Matthew says " this day," St. Luke 
says *' day by day." St. Matthew implies "Suffi- 
cient to each day is the want thereof;" St. Luke 
says : "And if there be a to-morrow, for it also God 
will provide." 

We descend, then, in this prayer, from the spiritual 
heights of the three former petitions. When we 
pray : " Our Father which art in heaven. Hallowed 
be Thy name ; Thy kingdom come ; Thy will be 
done, as in heaven, so on earth," we are moving on 
sunlit altitudes ; we breathe empyreal air. We bathe 

89 



90 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

earth in heaven ; we forget self in God ; we dilate, 
as it were, and conspire with the Hfe of the Eternal, 
and rise above our own infinitesimal Httleness. The 
petitions uplift us above that petty pride and ludi- 
crous conceit which degrades us so low. For in our- 
selves, however we strut and shout and give ourselves 
airs, we are nothing, and less than nothing; insects 
of an hour, crushed before the moth. It is in God 
alone that we can attain the least greatness, the least 
significance. Well may we cry, '' Lord, what is man 
that Thou art mindful of him?" And to that ques- 
tion comes the twofold answer. On the one hand, 
by himself, apart from God, man is a thing of naught, 
his time passeth away like a shadow ; on the other, 
when self is lost in God, when to man's wretched- 
ness God adds His own all-complete infinitude, then 
" Thou makest him a little lower than the angels, to 
crown him with glory and honor." 

But alas ! man cannot always or only live on these 
ethereal heights. A thousand daily infirmities, strong 
temptations, and bodily necessities remind him inces- 
santly that he is but dust. Disastrous failure always 
attends the vaulting ambition whicl^ would fain sever 
itself from the common needs of humanity and wind 
itself 

' ' Too high 
For sinful man beneath the sky." 

When man invents his own methods of saintH- 
ness the results are deplorable. The rude violence of 
fourth century hermits; the rancor and aberrations 



GIVE US THIS DA Y OUR DAIIY BREAD. 91 

of monks; the half-dazed imbecility of Stylites; the 
strange arrogance of ascetics, as ecclesiastical history 
reveals them — involve a solemn warning against the 
silly attempt to ignore the fact that though we are 
spirits we have bodies. Yes ! we are poor miserable 
human beings, living in the body of our humiliation, 
in our house of clay. God neither requires, nor en- 
courages, the absurdity of pretending that we can 
destroy our bodily needs. There is not in Christ's 
teaching one touch which sanctions that aXaCoveia — 
that unreality and braggart vaunt — of religionism 
which has led to so many sham forms of holiness and 
self-satisfying ideals of worship. 

In this prayer He recognizes our human needs, and 
bids us ask the All- Father that of His bounty they 
may be supplied. Were we to pray this prayer 
alone, our praying would be as material as the howl- 
ing of the young lions or the raven's cry. Were we 
to offer only the other petitions without this, our 
prayers might become fantastic and impractical — the 
prayers of ascetic dreamers, not the prayers of real 
human life. The combination of the two reminds us 
that though we are but mortal men, yet we see what 
manner of love the Father hath bestowed on us that 
we should be called children of God ! 

And so, both for warning and for blessedness, 
Christ puts this one earthly petition in the prayer He 
taught us. "All the rest," says Archbishop Leigh- 
ton, " are for things spiritual, and but one for tempo- 
rals ; those that regard the glory of God as the chief 



92 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

are three to one with it; and those that concern 
our own spiritual good, two for one. Thus for the 
number. And as for the order or place, it suits very 
well with this, the least of our requests, and so to 
be accounted by us. The prayer begins spiritually, 
and closes so, and this petition is cast in the middle." 
But though, out of the seven petitions — three for 
God's glory and three for our souls — there is this one 
for earthly things ; yet every word of this one, as we 
shall see, rebukes our earthHness. 

" Give us, O Father:" what a lovely prayer it is, 
thus simply uttered ; what a world of gratitude, of 
filial dependence, of devout acknowledgment lies in 
it ! The prayer is broad and simple. There is noth- 
ing in it of that pestering importunity of the sturdy 
vagrant, that base whine of greedy mendicity, which 
we have already seen to be the bane of prayer. We 
say '' give," because even when the bread is given 
and the water sure, we hourly remind ourselves 
whence it comes. 

'' Carnal men," it has been said, '' are like swine, 
which ravin upon the acorns, but look not up to the 
oak whence they drop." I hope that none of you 
neglect the good old simple, beautiful practice of 
*' grace before meat," and that, by teaching the sig- 
nificance of it to your children, you save them from 
the *' inexpressible calamity " of living lives which do 
not habitually look upwards to their source. Why 
should we live in the world as orphans, by not know- 
ing our Heavenly Father, or strut through it in silly 



GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD. 93 

disregard of Him? I find that sometimes, at the 
splendid banquets of the wealthy, the practice of say- 
ing grace is falling into neglect, and I am sorry for it. 
We ought not to sit down to the simplest meal, much 
more to God's choicest bounties — to tables radiant 
with the richest fruits and the loveliest flowers — with- 
out humbly and thankfully acknowledging the Giver. 
The very pagans did so. 

" The nightly hunter, lifting a bright eye 
Up towards the crescent moon, with grateful heart 
Called on the lovely wanderer who bestowed 
That timely light. . . . 

The traveller slaked 
His thirst from rill or gushing fount and thanked 
The Naiad." 

What a happy anecdote is that of St. Francis of 
Assisi, who, once sitting down with Brother Masseo 
to eat his poor meal from a table of natural rock be- 
side a gushing fountain, kept exclaiming again and 
again, ''W^e are not worthy of such a treasure." 
** How can you talk of a treasure," grumbled Fra 
Masseo, "when poverty is so hard upon us?" 
*' What we have is our treasure," answered Francis, 
** and this table is to me rich and precious, where 
nothing has been prepared by the work of man, but 
all given by the hand of God." 

And what but godless indifference can prevent us 
from thus acknowledging Him who giveth food to all 
flesh? Is it, forsooth, the immense pretentiousness 
of science ? What is our vaunted science, after all, 



94 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

but the soaring of an insect ? We live on the prod- 
ucts of the earth, growing in the soil, or transmuted 
by Nature's stupendous alchemy into the beast or 
winged fowl. Did science make the grass to grow 
upon the mountains, and green herb for the use of 
man? Did science create the warmth and the mois- 
ture which cause the dead seeds to germinate, and 
roll over the laughing and singing fields in billows of 
golden grain? Was it our petty science that kindled 
the great sun flaming in the zenith, or supplies its 
millions of leagues of torrent and tumultuous fire? 
Was it science which drew the waters by evaporation 
through the pellucid air from the inviolate sea, and 
winnowed them in the pure laboratory of the ether 
with the wings of all the winds, and made them hang 
iridescent in the rainbow's arch, or gleam with crim- 
son and amethyst when they drift athwart the sun- 
set as with the plumage of angels' wings? W^as it 
science which poured them gently down to earth 
again in the refreshfulness of silver rains, or caused 
them to glide at evening into the bosom of the rose, 
and hang like diamonds on the twinkhng herbage of 
the morning fields? How can science dare to deny 
the supernatural, when it is infinitely impotent to 
perform the most insignificant of these stupendous 
miracles, which in their boundless complexity sur- 
round each instant of our existence? Could all the 
science in the world create one grain of wheat? 
Science knows not even what life is ; how, then, could it 
thrill into inorganic matter one spark of that sacred fire ? 



GIVE US THIS DA V OUR DAILY BREAD. 95 

Let us put away these follies of unbelief, which, in 
the name of pseudo-science (for all true science is 
humble and adores), bid us thanklessly take the daily 
gift, while we ignore or deny the daily Giver. Let 
us rather know the filial joy of humble thankfulness, 
while, Hke those early Christians, breaking our bread 
at home, we take our food with gladness and single- 
ness of heart, praising God. Otherwise we do but 
bar God out of our hearts with His own gifts, and 
make our life like 

" The pleached bower 
Where honeysuckles, ripened by the sun, 
Forbid the sun to enter." 

Therefore, give, O Father ; give tLs. We will not say 
— Christ would not have us say — give me. Prayers 
purely selfish are altogether base. We will not ask 
any t Jang for ourselves alone. All our prayers shall 
be in the spirit of the large and lovely petition, " That 
it may please Thee to have mercy upon all men." In 
temporal things we will not foster in ourselves that 
hateful egotism which, when there would otherwise 
be enough for all, clutches and accumulates for self 
alone ; nor, so far as the prayer is spiritual, will we 
cherish that immeasurable religious selfishness which 
sings hallelujahs over itself, as it clings to its own 
plank of supposed safety amid the weltering surge. 

No ! give us ! Give, O Father, to those whom 
we hate, and those who without a cause hate us ; to 
those whom we despise, and those who despise us. 



96 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

Give to all by whose stupidity, or by whose mahce, 
we are injured; to all by whose greed or vileness we 
are repelled. We are all sinners; we all share the 
same fallen nature. We are all God's prodigals ; all 
brothers in the same great family ; all equally guilty, 
all equally redeemed. We cannot separate ourselves 
even from the worst and lowest of our fellow-men. 
Father, Thy Christ teaches us that we are all one in 
Him : forgive our hatreds, our mutual Hes, the malice 
with which we destroy one another, the littleness by 
which we Thy children are to each other the sorest, 
surest ill. Thus, even in the one prayer for ourselves 
does Christ rebuke our selfishness. Father, give us ! 
And give us this day. We are but creatures of a 
day ; we will not be troubled and anxious about the 
morrow. Sufficient for the day its want, its good, its 
evil. To-day is ours ; to-morrow is Thine, as yester- 
day is Thine. We will ask for no accumulations. If 
Thou hast given us much, we will no more trust in 
ourselves than if we had nothing; and if we have 
nothing for to-morrow, we trust Thee still. By this 
narrowing of the too large horizons of earthly hopes, 
by this reproof of the enormity and boundlessness 
of our desires, Thou teachest us to trust wholly in 
Thee for our exiguous earthly needs. Oh, save us 
from the gnawing cares, the feverish anxieties, of that 
distrust of Thee, out of which the love of money 
springs. Save us from the base eagerness of gam- 
bling speculation, " the hasting to be rich, the endless 
scheming, the pitiful coiling and uncoiling and self- 



GIVE US THIS DA V OUR DAILY BREAD. 97 

involved returns of fantastic hopes and deep depres- 
sion in individuals, the reactions of mad prosperity 
and intense suffering in nations." Save us from the 
spirit of the rich fool, who, heedless of all the misery 
around, cared only to pull down his barns and build 
greater, and to bid his soul " eat, drink, and be merry." 
Save us from this vile acquisitiveness of Mammon- 
worship, lest on our souls, as on his, should come 
crashing down the doom which shattered all his 
greedy and selfish dreams : " Thou fool, this night 
they require of thee thy soul!" 

Give us, then, this day. There is a living in and 
for the present, without either forecast or retrospect, 
which is more worthy of a beast than of a man ; b|Ut 
there is also a wise and holy living in the present, 
which Christ would teach us, because the present 
alone is ours. There is a fooHsh and dangerous lin- 
gering in the past, which Christ reproves when He 
says, '' Let the dead bury their dead," and St. Paul 
when he says, *' Forgetting those things that are 
behind." There is also a morbid and faithless living 
in the future, the mother of anxiety and discontent, 
which Christ reproves when He says, '* Be not over- 
anxious about the morrow, for the morrow shall take 
thought for the things of itself." Thus, even in pass- 
ing, Christ would teach us to use rightly the passing 
hour. '* Take one step onward, and secure that step." 
Live out, truly and nobly, the life of each day, day 
by day. Not an attempted supernatural life, for you 
are a man, not an angel ; not a wicked Hfe, for you 



98 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

are a man and not a fiend ; not a sensual life, for you 
are a man and not a beast ; not a frivolous life, for 
you are a man and not an insect. But live each day 
the true Hfe of a man to-day. Not yesterday's life 
only, lest you become a murmurer, nor to-morrow's, 
lest you become a visionary ; but the life of to-day, 
with happy yesterdays and confident to-morrows; 
the Hfe of to-day unwounded by the Parthian arrows 
of 3'esterday, and — come calamity, come sorrow — still 
trustful to God for to-morrow's golden peace. " Re- 
pent," said R. Johanan ben Zaccai to his pupils, '' one 
day before your death." ''Does a man, then, know 
the day of his death? " they asked. " So much the 
more," was the reply, '' let him repent to-day lest he 
should die to-morrow. So will his whole life be one 
of repentance." 

Father, give us this day our daily bread. Every 
word of this prayer, though it be the humblest of the 
seven petitions, is still a word of pure gold. It is full 
of meaning that we ask for our daily bread. It is 
only the just, the diligent, the moderate, who can 
rightly use the prayer. The bread of the idle, of 
those who merely consume the fruits of earth to 
which they add nothing, of those '' who sit down to 
the feast of life and slink ofT without paying their 
reckoning," is not their own bread. Again, the bread 
of the greedy, which they heap up for themselves 
while others starve, the bread of those who die ava- 
ricious and selfish millionaires, is not their own bread. 
And the bread of the rapacious, who live by cheating 



GIVE US THIS DA V OUR DAILY BREAD. 99 

others of their just dues, or tempting them to their 
ruin, is not their own bread. On the bread of these 
a curse rests. 

** A noble heart," says Barrow, *' will disdain to 
subsist, like a drone, on the honey gained by others' 
labor ; or, like vermin, to filch its food from the pub- 
lic granary ; or, like a shark, to prey on the lesser 
fry ; but will, one way or other, earn his subsistence, 
for he that doth not earn can hardly own his bread. 
When we say ' Give us our daily bread,' we pray, 
even in that one word, that we may Hve lives of 
happy industry and honest aim." 

Give us this day our daily bread. The word daily 
is in the original a difficult word. It occurs here, and 
nowhere else in all Greek literature. It has been 
rendered " supersubstantial," a sacramentarian mean- 
ing idly dragged into it by false philology. It has 
been rendered " sufficient," in the sense of " feed me 
with food convenient for me." It has been rendered 
*' bread for the morrow," as in a prayer offered at 
evening, when the Jewish day began. It has been 
rendered " bread for our subsistence." But the great- 
est scholars rightly acquiesce in the rendering ''daily," 
which remains unaltered in the Revised Version. It 
deepens the teaching that we are to live as children 
in our Father's house, relying on God's providence 
for all that Hes beyond the immediate need. 

Lastly, all for which we here ask God is bread, the 
staff, the maintenance of our natural life. It includes 
all that is necessary, and it comes to us day by day, 



100 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

as the manna came to Israel in the wilderness from 
heaven. They were not allowed to gather more than 
for the day ; if they greedily and disobediently did 
so, it stank and bred worms and grew corrupt. And 
as was the manna to them, so is the bread to us, 
symbolical of something beyond itself. It means, as 
the spirits in Dante sing it: — 

"Our daily manna give to us to-day, 
Without wliich, whoso through this desert drear 
Journeys, goes back though pressing on his way." 

Here, as everywhere, Christ's teaching lays the axe 
at the root of all our sensual desires for gluttonies, 
luxuries, and superfluities. The Israelites, though 
they had their heavenly manna, basely sighed for 
the leeks and fleshpots of Egypt. Lust came upon 
them in the wilderness, and they tempted God in the 
desert. And God gave them their own desire ; they 
were not disappointed of their lust. But to teach 
them that He loves contentment, simpHcity, and 
moderation, and would not have us like foul drunk- 
ards, and 

" Men full of meat whom most His soul abhors," 

therefore " He sent leanness withal into their souls." 
While the meat was yet in their mouths the heavy 
wrath of God came upon them, and slew the mighti- 
est of them, yea, and smote down the chosen men 
that were in Israel. 

By bidding us ask only for our daily bread, Christ 



GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAIIY BREAD. lOI 

would teach us that, when we long for surfeitings and 
drunkenness, we are but ** like rats that ravin to our 
proper bane " ; and that when we yearn for and heap 
up riches, we are but hewing to ourselves cisterns, 
broken cisterns, which will hold no water. He would 
teach us that a man's life consisteth not in the multi- 
tude of things that he possesseth. He would teach 
us the folly of imagining *' that there is happiness in 
having much, when reason, and religion, and experi- 
ence try in vain to teach us the contrary." He would 
point us the way to the true riches : that holy and 
trustful love which makes even the struggle for exist- 
ence, and the wear and tear of daily life, '' not like 
the convict's trample on the world's great treadmill, 
but like an ascent on the luminous steps of duty to 
the very gates of heaven." 

And that is why this prayer, though it be a frank 
and simple prayer for bodily needs, is a prayer for 
much more than mere bodiiy needs — a prayer, as our 
Catechism rightly explains it, for '' all things that be 
needful both for our souls and bodies." For ** man 
doth not Hve by bread alone, but by every word that 
proceedeth out of the mouth of God." Christ is the 
Bread of Life. Life apart from Him is not life, but 
death. We pray, then, here for our spirits also ; 
** Lord, evermore give us this bread, that we hunger 
no more, neither thirst any more." So rich, so sweet, 
so full of divine instruction is even this simplest and 
seemingly earthliest clause of the prayer which Christ 
hath taught. 



I02 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

Father : for of Thee all fatherhood in heaven and 
on earth is named, and Thee we love, and in Thee 
wo. put our trust ; give : for there is no true gift save 
those which come from Thee, and all other gifts, 
however bathed in deceitful glamour, are but curses 
in disguise ; give its, for may we never ask anything 
for ourselves alone, but meet always on *' the equal 
platform of creatureship and redemption," where 
Thou, who madest all souls, lovest the souls that 
Thou hast made. Give us this day : for the day is 
Thine, and the night is Thine, and if Thou takest 
away our breath we die, and return again to our dust. 
Give us this day our bread : let us injure none, de- 
fraud none, keep back from none, but earn in honest 
labor, and repay by gratitude and mercy to our fel- 
low-men. Give us this day our daily bread: that 
only which pertains to us, which is convenient for us, 
which is sufficient for our sustenance, hating glut- 
tonous excesses, and intemperate revehngs. Give us 
this day our daily bread : day by day the bread for 
this life, the living bread, the bread which came down 
from heaven, even the Son of Man who is in heaven, 
which if any eat he shall live forever— even the Spirit 
which He giveth us, and the words that He speaketh 
unto us — for they are spirit and they are life. 



FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES. 



103 



And forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven 
our debtors. 

St. Matthew vi. 12. 

WE have all of us repeated the Lord's Prayer 
many thousands of times in our Hves; how 
little has the best and wisest of us realized the fulness 
of its divine significance ! I trust that, in these brief 
studies, some of us may have at least caught a glimpse 
of the truth that not one petition of it is needless or 
fantastic; that each clause is not only an act of 
humility and submission, but that, one by one, they 
are a lesson, a warning, an exhortation, a trumpet- 
call to action. But have you noticed how, in the 
divine construction of the prayer, there is a whole 
theology, a complete Gospel ? how it places us before 
God in every aspect of our natural life ? 

Glance again at the clauses we have already con- 
sidered. 

'' OiLr FatJier which art in heaven'' There, strik- 
ing the keynote of all prayer, Christ teaches us the 
purity and majesty of the Eternal, and bids us come 
before Him, on the one hand, with reverence and 
godly fear, on the other, with the perfect love and 
confidence of accepted children. 

105 



I06 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

''Hallowed be Thy name'' There we are taught 
to lose ourselves,' as in a sea of light, in the ocean of 
His infinite holiness. 

''Thy kingdo7n come.'' There the hope and prom- 
ise is given us of a regenerated world, and we are 
called to devote our lives to its furtherance. 

"Thy will be done." There we are invited to sur- 
render altogether to God that element in us whence 
springs all our rebelhon and all our misery, and to 
learn that the sole end of life is to acquire perfect 
uniformity with the will of our Maker. 

"As in heave^t so on earth." In that sub-clause is 
set before us the pattern and example for our own 
practical realization of those three spiritual petitions. 

Then the note is changed. We cease to breathe 
empyreal atmosphere. We descend from heaven to 
earth. In the humble prayer, "Give us this day otir 
daily bread" we present ourselves to God as poor, 
needy, human creatures. Once more in this prayer, 
"Forgive tis our trespasses" we reveal another and 
yet lower depth of our humiliation, and come before 
God, not only as helpless pensioners, but alas! as re- 
bellious children. As the first three petitions soar 
upwards like doves with silver wings and covered 
with feathers like gold, so the three that follow sink 
low among the broken potsherds of earth, and man 
appears before God unworthy and defaced ; first, as 
a needy creature — Give us our daily bread ; next as 
a guilty creature — Forgive us our sins ; next as a 
tempted and imperiled creature — Lead us not into 



FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES. 107 

temptation^ but deliver us from the Evil One. When 
we offer these petitions we say with the poet : 

" Four things which are not in Thy treasury, 
We lay before Thee, Lord, with this petition — 
Our nothingness, our wants. 
Our sins, and our contrition. 
Oh, meet our needs for all 
From Thy rich mercy free!" 

The first three petitions might have been offered 
by Adam and Eve while yet they sat under the palms 
of Paradise ; this one can have no meaning but on 
the lips of a fallen race. 

There come moments to us all in which, as Cardinal 
Newman said, we only recognize the existence of two 
supreme and luminously self-evident entities, God and 
our own souls. In this petition the soul of each of us, 
as the guilty member of a guilty race, flings itself with 
all its fellow-sinners in penitent self-abasement on 

"The world's great altar-stairs 
That slope through darkness up to God." 

The first thing felt by the soul of man, when once it 
begins to know what itself is and what God is, is the 
sense of guilt and dread. Nothing is idler than to 
say that it is only Christianity which has cast over 
the race the awful gloom caused by this sense of 
guilt. All literature, all history refutes that allega- 
tion. The shuddering sense of guilt in man's heart, 
attested by human sacrifices and horrible self-tortures, 
is found in every form, and even every travesty of 
religion, from the fetish-worship of the South Seas 



I08 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

to the horrors which crept even into sceptical pagan- 
ism, and even to those perversions of mediaeval Chris- 
tianity which tended to degrade it from glad tidings 
of great joy into a religion of priestly tyranny, ascetic 
self-torture, and ghastly fear. Fear has lain at the 
centre of all heathen systems. Men have shuddered 
at the sense of guilt ; they have trembled through all 
their bones at the tremendous thought of God. They 
had no gospel ; they knew no doctrine of the remis- 
sion of sins. Feeling guilt, and ignorant of its rem- 
edy, the votaries of pagan systems have sunk into lewd 
despair, or contented themselves with the wild cry — 

" Place me alone in some frail boat, 

'Mid the horrors of an angry sea, 
Where I, while time shall move, may float 

Despairing either land or day ; 
Or under earth my youth confine 

To the night and silence of a cell, 
Where scorpions round my limbs may twine, 

O God, so Thou forgive me hell." 

But Christ has not given us the spirit of bondage 
again to fear, but the spirit of adoption, whereby we 
cry "Abba, Father!" In Christ perfect love casteth 
out fear, because fear hath torment. Christ alone 
taught us to approach our heavenly Father with bold- 
ness, and to say, '' Forgive us our trespasses, as we 
forgive them that trespass against us." 

We have here two things : the appeal " Forgive 
us," and the ground of it, ** as we forgive." But this 
morning we must pass over that added clause alto- 
gether, since we shall have no time to do more than 



FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES. 109 

glance at the awful mysteries involved in the petition 
'* Forgive us our trespasses." 

St. Matthew has the word "debts" (ofpstXTJixaia) ; 
St. Luke says " sins " (ajxapxLag). The words which 
indicate the aberration of our race are *' mournfully 
numerous," but each of them presents but a different 
aspect of the one immense insuperable mystery, the 
mystery of all mysteries, the trial of all faith, the 
anguish and ruin of all nature, the plague of every 
individual heart. The commonest word for sin in 
Scripture is ajiapita. It means the missing of a mark ; 
it emphasizes the truth that sin is a blunder and a 
ruin ; that sin means failure ; and that a life spent in 
sin is a Ufe which loses the very end — yes, and every 
end — for which alone it was created. Other words 
in the Bible are avo(iia, lawlessness ; :rapaxo'?], hearing 
amiss, or disobedience; :rapd[3aai?, trespass, going 
across the boundary, transgression ; TcapdTTTWixa, fault, 
falling aside, moral aberration ; TJTTTjiJLa, defeat, discom- 
fiture ; daspsta, impiousness ; 7rXY][jL{isX£La, disharmony, 
a metaphor from music, as when Shakespeare says : 

" How sour sweet music is 
When time is broke, and no proportion kept, 
So is it with the music of men's lives ;" 

or as when Milton tells how, making us out of tune 
with heaven, 

" Disproportioned sin 
Jarred against Nature's chime, and with harsh din 
Broke the fair music that all creatures made 
To their great Lord." 



no THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

These words, you will see, indicate sin alike in its 
nature and in its results. They indicate sin in its 
nature as a violation of the commandment, as a trans- 
gression of the law, as a stepping over the boundary, 
as a refusal to listen to the voice of God ; and sin in 
its miserable results, as a failure, a defeat, a losing of 
the way, a missing of the aim, a ruin of the purpose 
for which alone we were created, a harsh chromatic 
jar, spoiling and jangling the tune of God into horrible 
discordancy. 

But the notion prominent in our Lord's Prayer, as 
recorded in both Evangelists, is that of debt ; for St. 
Luke has '' Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves also 
forgive every one who is indebted to us." If any of 
you have known the shame, the guilt, the burden, the 
misery of wilful debt, the concealment to which it 
leads, the dishonesty which it implies, the way in 
which it adds to all other temptations, and usually 
ends in other forms of guilt, the impossibility it leaves 
of looking the whole world in the face, its tendency 
to accumulate into an avalanche of disgrace and ruin 
— you will understand the metaphor. It will help to 
show you also how the sin and the punishment are 
identical. 

Sin is not one thing and penalty another; but 
penalty is the inevitable reaction of sin, the insepa- 
rable shadow which is cast by it and dogs it. And 
all sin is of the nature of debt. It is a vast threefold 
debt, against which there are no assets, which man 



FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES. I I I 

incurs to himself, to his neighbor, and to his God. 
For himself he received his body so beautiful, so 
marvellous, so capable as a mechanism of health and 
strength and service ; the intellect so receptive, so 
enriched with galleries for glowing pictures of the 
imagination, so adapted both ** to spin the gossamers 
and forge the anchors " of noble happiness ; the spirit, 
endowed with the wings of angels to uplift man into 
a creature of the skies. How has he used these 
gifts ? Alas ! in what multitude of cases the short- 
ened life, the shattered health, the vice-marred coun- 
tenance, the dishonored members, are the fruits of 
disease and death accumulated by the debt contracted 
with himself in his mortal body by dissipation and 
excess ; and the intellect weakened by indolence, and 
the polluted imagination, and* the haunted memory; 
and the soul swept by '' the gusts of vexatious, fret- 
ful, lawless passions." How shameful is the wrong 
men do ; how terrible the debt they owe, to their 
own selves ; and what debts to their neighbors ! Oh, 
there are men around whom the curses of their fel- 
low-men wait hungry- eyed for all the wrongs that 
they have done through all their selfish, ill-flavored 
lives. Think of those who have lived by oppression, 
robbery, and wrong ; think of those whose fraudulent 
banks and bubble companies and gambling specu- 
lations have plunged into ruin the widow and the 
fatherless ; think of those who all their lives long have 
systematically slandered their neighbors; think of 



112 THE LORD'S PRAYER, 

those whose uncleanness has crowded miserable cities 
with human beings whose Hves are a cHnging curse 
to others and a living death to themselves. And 
there is that debt of ten thousand talents to God! 
Oh, who shall measure it? Do not our lives often 
look to us like one black night of sins of omission, 
lightened through by sins of commission? Even if 
we had only committed sins which our seared con- 
sciences consider as little sins, if they seem light when 
we measure, are they light when we number them? 
'' Dead leaves fall one by one." They float down so 
lightly that they hardly ripple the glassy mirror of a 
stream ; but when they are driven by the wind into 
putrescent heaps, are they nothing then? So is it 
with the ever accumulating offences of the hours, 
days, weeks, months, years of our mortal life. And 
all our sins are remembered, all recorded, in our 
memories, in our consciences, indelibly in that awful 
book which lies ever open at the foot of the throne 
of God. 

Such, my friends, are ''our debts," "our trespasses," 
and as long as they are unforgiven, not only are their 
results inevitable, but their results are implicit. As 
regards ourselves, those results form a distorting mist, 
in which we see all things falsely, taking the shadow 
for the substance, and the substance for the shadow. 
They are a darkness, in which the very light in us is 
darkness, because passion has extinguished it. They 
are a weight, so bending us that we are not able to 
look up. They are a fretting leprosy, taking stronger 



FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES. 113 

hold of us ; they are a paralysis, benumbing our will 
with impotence, and handing us over helpless to the 
iron scourge of despair. And as regards God, they 
are an awful sense of terror and alienation, in which 
He has fallen silent to us, and hides His countenance 
from us. And so, when sin has become habit, and 
habit character, and character has assumed the dread- 
ful guise of necessity, our guilt *' sinks the soul into 
deeper darkness ; fires it with more burning antago- 
nism; freezes it in a more stagnant isolation." Well 
may the poor crushed sinner cry from such an abhor- 
rent prison, " Wretched man that I am, who shall 
deliver me from the body of this death?" 

''Forgive tcs our trespasses''' Oh, with what groan- 
ings that cannot be uttered, should we breathe that 
prayer, if we had but faith to feel that, when uttered 
from the heart, it gains for us the indescribable bless- 
edness of the man whose unrighteousness is forgiven, 
whose sin is covered. But, taking advantage of our 
lusts, Satan says to us, ''This cannot be." There can 
be no forgiveness of sins. Look round you : — in the 
natural world there is no forgiveness of sins. You 
have sinned against yourself. Can you get back the 
health wrecked by the dissipation of your youth? 
Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his 
spots? In sins against your neighbor, can you recall 
the poison of your evil example, of your whispered 
temptation, of your slanderous word? As well try 
to stop the stone which you have set rolling on the 
mountain-side ! 



114 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

Omnipotence itself cannot recall the word once 
uttered ; cannot undo the deed once done. So Satan 
whispers to us, '' You are mine. Resist no longer, for 
it is vain." 

Ah, my friends! you who have on your souls the 
burden of guilt, or the stain of sin — and who has not ? 
— Hsten not to Satan and despair, but to Him who 
taught you daily to pray, '* Father, forgive us our 
trespasses." It is a gospel; it is a miracle; it is true 
that there is nothing like it in the world of nature or 
of man. It is avowedly supernatural. It is exclu- 
sively the gift of God. With man this is impossible, 
but with God all things are possible. " Was ever 
miracle greater than this miracle?" it has been truly 
asked. '* To roll back the Red Sea or the Jordan 
upon itself were easier surely, far easier than this " — 
this undoing of the thing done, this cancelling of the 
unpayable debt ! But, for this miracle. He who can- 
not lie teaches us to pray. He not only tells us that 
sin can be forgiven, but, knowing that we come before 
Him as guilty creatures, He bids us ask daily cleans- 
ing for daily assoilment, and daily plead with God, 
** Father, a(p£<; — forgive, remit, send away, destroy 
our trespasses ; make them as though they had never 
been." 

When Satan would inspire into us a disbeHef in the 
efficacy of this prayer, let us confront him with Christ's 
whole Gospel. It all turns upon this — that sin can 
be forgiven, always ; can be forgiven, utterly ; super- 
naturally, not naturally; in Christ, not in ourselves. 



FORIGVE US OUR TRESPASSES. 115 

What is promised ? — Is sin a debt ? It shall be can- 
celled. Is it a handwriting against us ? It shall be 
annulled, torn across, blotted out, its rent fragments 
nailed to the cross of Christ. Is it a deadly stain? 
" Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white 
as snow ; though they be red like crimson, they shall 
be as wool." Is it the shattered tablets of broken 
laws? God has promised to silence their menaces, 
and deliver us from their curse. Is it a mass of fatal 
evidence? God shall seal it up, fling it behind His 
back, cast it into the depths of the sea, put it far from 
us as the east is from the west, or heaven from earth. 
Is it a prison-house ? He who came to preach deliv- 
erance to the captives hath burst the gates of brass, 
and shattered the bars of iron in sunder. Oh,' if the 
words for sin are mournfully numerous, the metaphors 
for its remission are yet more gloriously varied. It 
is not only that in the next life the entail of curse 
shall be cut off, but the very body of sin destroyed. 
" Nothing indeed," as St. Augustine says, '* is so 
much our ow^n as our sins; " but God can purge our 
conscience from them. Does justice require their 
inexorable penalty? Mercy triumphs over justice. 
Are our sins too great to be forgiven? Their very 
greatness constitutes the force of our appeal to Him. 
** Be merciful unto my sin, for it is great." 

And if all these promises be insufficient to convince 
you, think of all who have tested and found them 
true. Think of those bidden wedding guests at the 
great King's table, to all of whom, soiled from the 



Il6 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

waysides and the hedges, was given the wedding 
garment of the King's Son ; think of all the prodigals 
who have come, so weary and so footsore, so sick, so 
disgraced, so stained, from the far land and the swine, 
for whom there has still been the best robe and the 
rejoicing welcome. Think of all those polluted souls 
who have washed their robes and made them white 
in the blood of the Lamb. Think of poor cheating 
Jacob, who became Israel, a Prince with God. Think 
of David, the murderer and adulterer, to whom God 
yet restored the clean heart and the free spirit. 
Think of cursing and swearing Peter, think of savage, 
persecuting Paul, who yet became chief among the 
apostles. Think of the penitent robber on the cross ; 
the rough jailer; the thievish runaway. Think of 
the ignoble, swindling publicans, who did not beat 
upon their breasts in vain ; think of the harlots, the 
common infamy, out of whom He cast the seven 
devils of sensuality, and who were not pushed back 
when they wept upon His feet. These entered into 
the kingdom of heaven before priests and Pharisees, 
because it is the helpless, who know their helpless- 
ness, to whom Christ came. Much forgiven, they 
loved much. Think of St. Augustine, the impure 
African boy; of St. Jerome, the once lewd youth; of 
St. Cyprian, the once arrogant worldling. Think of 
all those heathen converts, once fornicators, adulter- 
ers, effeminate, thieves, covetous, drunkards, revil- 
ers, extortioners, but afterwards saints of God and 
dear children, washed, cleansed, justified, sanctified. 



FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES. I 17 

Think even of all the demoniacs, sitting at last at 
Christ's feet, clothed and in their right mind. 

Why was there, and is there, and why has there 
ever been, this forgiveness so large, so full, so free, 
but because Christ bore for us the crushing burden, 
and paid for us the immeasurable debt? Why, but 
because Christ loved us so much even while we were 
yet sinners, and thought our souls worth so much, 
sinful though they were, that He came down to earth 
to live for us as a sinless man, and die for us as a 
hated malefactor? But for Him our sins would be 
indeed incurable ; the whole head would be sick, and 
the whole heart faint, and there would be no balm in 
Gilead, and no physician there. Brethren, it was this 
Saviour who taught this prayer. Would He have 
made these promises only to mock us by their re- 
fusal? Will you disbelieve Him who is the Truth 
itself? If so many myriads of sinners have been for- 
given, and converted into saints, what prevents that 
you too should be received graciously, loved freely, 
forgiven wholly, and be born again ; and, having been 
vile and guilty, should be clothed in white robes, and 
become pure and clean and loving? Be sure that if 
we pray it aright, our prayer will be answered. 

Are you worse than all these? Well, and if you 
were, the greater is your need, the deeper is His 
compassion. His office is to save ; yours to look to 
Him for help. Are you the slave of evil tempers 
and raging passions ? Go to Him as some demoniac. 
Has utter deadness crept over you ? Go as the im- 



Il8 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

potent paralytic. Does dissipation claim you as its 
wretched and shattered victim ? Go as a lunatic. Is 
there darkness all round you? Go like the blind 
Bartimeus. And if you feel all foul with inward 
leprosy, go always as a leper, crying, as Isaiah did, 
'' Unclean, unclean!" * 

And do you think that He who was called the 
Friend of sinners will repudiate you ? Or that He, 
whose feet the Magdalen washed with her tears and 
wiped with the hairs of her head, will spurn you from 
the footstool of His mercy ? Was it not thought the 
disgrace of the bad Stuart king James II. that he 
admitted his nephew, the Duke of Monmouth, to his 
presence, and saw him grovel at his feet, and yet re- 
fused him the life for which he pleaded? When the 
young Bourbon prince, the Due d'Enghien, doomed 
to death, asked Napoleon to see him. Napoleon re- 
fused, and when asked why he had refused, he said, 
" Had I seen him, I must have pardoned him ; as I 
had determined not to pardon him, I would not see 
him." Hear what the unjust judge saith! And can 
you do Christ the monstrous injustice to imagine in 
Him the cruelty of bidding you to pray God for par- 
don, when He knew that the pardon was impossible, 
and would be refused? 

My brethren, God only knows who is the worst 
sinner here ; there may be many worst sinners here. 
In this vast mixed congregation there may be the 
thief, the drunkard, the harlot, the fornicator, the 

* I have seen a sentence to this effect in some Puritan divine. 



FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES. I 19 

adulterer, the slanderer, or worse; there may be 
many a man or woman whose conscience, burning 
with guilty secrets, says to them, '' You are falHng 
headlong, headlong into destruction." Yet, let them 
come — let the worst come ; and, oh ! God has prom- 
ised that they shall be forgiven, their leprosy cleansed, 
their soul born again Hke the soul of a little child! 
Those only cannot yet be heard who are defiant, will- 
ing, determined, high-handed sinners ; who sin, and 
mean to go on sinning; and do not repent, and do 
not intend to repent; and love the sin which is their 
curse better than God their Saviour. To those in 
this state of mind the prayer becomes absurd, nay 
blasphemous ; for they are only mocking God by the 
pretence of asking forgiveness for sins for which they 
are not sorry, for which they do not repent, which 
they perfectly intend to go on committing. For such, 
while they are such, the prayer is no prayer, or just 
as absurd as if they were to pray that two and two 
might not make four. But I trust that there are very 
few, if any, so hardened, so wicked, such insolent and 
defiant rebels against the grace of God which calleth 
them to repentance. And to every penitent I say, 
Come boldly ; come assuredly ; come expecting to be 
heard; quite sure that you will be heard. Are we 
to be surprised that God keeps His word? 

** I stood amazed, and whispered, 'Can it be 

That He hath granted all the boon I sought? 
How wonderful that He for me hath wrought! 
How wonderful that He hath answered me!' 



120 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

O faithless heart ! He said that He would hear 
And answer thy poor prayer ; and He hath heard, 

And proved His promise! Wherefore didst thou fear? 
Why marvel that thy Lord hath kept His word? 

More wonderful if He should fail to bless 

Expectant faith and prayer with good success!" 



AS WE FORGIVE THEM THAT TRES- 
PASS AGAINST US. 



121 



As we forgive them that trespass against us. 

St. Matthew vi. 12. 

THE last time that my duties called me here, I 
spoke to you on *' Forgive us our trespasses " ; 
let us now consider very simply the conclusion 
of the clause. I have read it to you in the most 
familiar form; but if you would know with exact 
accuracy what our Lord said, you must turn to the 
Revised Version. There you will read, in St. Matthew, 
"And forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven 
our debtors; " and in St. Luke, "And forgive us our 
sins ; for we ourselves also forgive every one that is 
indebted to iis'^ 

You will see that any difficulties the clause may 
have suggested to you are not lightened but rather 
pressed home by the more accurate renderings. They 
show even more distinctly that unforgiving is unfor- 
given, that our forgiveness of others is distinctly the 
condition of God's forgiveness of us. The words are 
only indirectly a prayer that we may be helped to 
forgive ; they are a plea, because we have forgiven ; 
they are an appeal, "Forgive tis, for we also forgive." 

Now the more we study the Lord's Prayer, the 
more rich in instruction shall we find it. One point 

123 



124 ^-^-^ LORD'S PRAYER. 

which is constantly overlooked is, that every one of 
the seven petitions of which it consists is not only a 
petition, but also involves a duty and a vow. Not 
one of them is an idle prayer ; each requires an effort. 

''Our Father.'' Then we are Thy sons, and Thou 
lovest us, and wilt hear us. 

''Which art i7i heaven.''' And therefore our souls 
must be full of reverence and holy fear in coming 
before Thee. 

"Be Thy name made holy." Therefore it is the 
duty of our lives to hate whatsoever dishonors that 
holy name. 

"Thy kingdom come." Woe unto us, then, if like 
idle, lazy, selfish drones we are doing nothing to 
advance that kingdom and to assail its foes. 

"Thy will he done." Therefore we are bound to 
strive more and more, all our lives long, to have no 
will but Thine. 

"As in heaven^ so on earth." And therefore our 
service must be ceaseless, vivid, hearty, ungrudging 
as those of the spirits in heaven. 

"Give." For from Thee alone all good things 
come; 

"Give lis." For we pray not for our wretched 
selves only, but for all our brethren in the great 
family of man ; 

"Give us this day." For only to-day is ours; to- 
morrow is Thine, and may be never ours, as yester- 
day is Thine, and is ours no longer ; 



AS IVE FORGIVE THEM THAT TRESPASS. 12S 

"Give US this day otcr daily breads Bread; for 
that suffices, and in that is inckided all that is neces- 
sary for our bodies and our souls ; and, since we pray 
for it, it is the primitive duty of our Hves diHgently 
and honestly to work for it. 

''And forgive its otir trespasses'' It is our duty 
to strive against committing them; but we are all 
steeped in sin and shame, and with Thee alone is the 
divine power, and the infinite compassion, which can 
forgive sins. 

''As we forgive them that trespass against us'' 
Ah! there the vow is not merely implied, as it is in 
each of the other seven petitions, but it is expressed ; 
and the mere fact that it is thus expressed shows 
ahke how difficult and how necessary it is. It points 
us to an antecedent condition ; as Shakespeare says : 

" We pray for mercy, 
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render 
The deeds of mercy." 

Let the Lord's Prayer teach us, then, that by 
Christ's own lesson, the condition of all prayer is 
action. Prayer, which we deem so easy, which we 
perform so perfunctorily, is, when it is real prayer, the 
passion of an effort, the wrestling of a life. Prayers 
which are not uttered from the heart are but forms 
and functions and idle breaths of articulated air. As 
our great Laureate, who lies in yonder grave, expressed 
it in his last poem : 



126 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

" To pray, to do — 
To pray, to do according to the prayer, 
Are both to worship Alia ; but the prayers 
Which have no successors in deed are faint 
And pale in Alla's eyes — fair mothers they, 
Dying in childbirth of dead sons." 

But what do we mean by saying to God : *' Forgive 
us, ^^ we have forgiven"; *' forgive us, y^rwe for- 
give " ? 

1. Is it a self-righteous prayer? Does it mean that 
we bring something with us to God which merits the 
forgiveness which we ask and so sorely need? Nay, 
not so. We do not come to Him with the braggart 
vaunt of the Pharisee. We do not flaunt before Him 
our righteousness, which is but as filthy rags. *' Noth- 
ing in my hand I bring." But we pledge ourselves 
to the duty which He requires of us. We confess, 
with our own lips, that the condition is essential, and 
that if we do not try to fulfil it, our prayer must be 
in vain. 

2. Still, how can we say '' Forgive us as we for- 
give " ? Do we desire that oiir imperfect, grudging 
forgiveness should be the model and measure of 
God's? Is this wretched puddle of our reluctant 
magnanimity to measure that infinite sea of God's 
compassion? Is the ungracious scantness with which 
we give up our paltry hundred pence to indicate the 
way in which He cancels and obliterates the colossal 
due of our ten thousand talents? Ah no! my friends, 
we fall into no such silly error. The ''as we forgive " 
impHes ''not equahty in the degree, but only conform- 



AS WE FORGIVE THEM THAT TRESPASS. 12J 

ity in the thing"; it asks forgiveness, not equally 
scanty in amount, not equally grudging in concession, 
but dimly analogous in kind, though immeasurably 
vaster and more blessed in degree. 

3. "Forgive us, as v^e have forgiven; forgive us, 
for we also forgive." Are we then to set up our- 
selves as an example to God ? Do we bid Him to 
copy us, and not to be harder or worse than we are ? 
Nay, that might be a quite impossible blasphemy ; 
and yet, in the sense of a dumb, blind, helpless appeal, 
God does permit something like it. It is like the old 
epitaph : 

" Here lie I, David Elginbrod, 
Have mercy on my sins, Lord God ; 
As I would do, were I Lord God, 
And ye were David Elginbrod." 

It is not blasphemy, it is a trembling, filial confi- 
dence. It is an appeal to God by that element of 
His own nature which He has implanted in us. 

" The wish that of the living whole 
No life may fail beyond the grave, 
Derives it not from what we have, 
The likest God within the soul? " 

It is a cry from that which is most divine in man 
to that which is most divine in God. We, poor 
wretches, as we are taught by Thee, can forgive one 
another. If, then, '' there be any such goodness in 
us, it is from Thee, and therefore is infinitely more 
in Thyself as the ocean of goodness." We cry as 
David does in the poem : 



128 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

"Would I suffer for Mm that I love? So wouldst Thou! So wilt 
Thou! 
So shall crown Thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown, 
And Thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down 
One spot for the creature to stand in." 

Our forgiveness is at the best but a dewdrop; yet 
even a dewdrop may reflect the blue infinite heaven 
and the glory of the risen sun. 

Now I said that this condition — that our forgive- 
ness of our brother must coincide with our forgive- 
ness by God our Father — was necessary. Is it not 
supremely necessary? Rightly do 

' ' The gods 
Avenge on stony hearts a fruitless prayer 
For pity." 

Mercifully does Christ require this as a condition of 
our own forgiveness ; for the fulfilment of this con- 
dition in all its breadth would extinguish envy, hatred, 
malice, and all uncharitableness, and would change 
into blessedness the misery of the world. And see 
how much Christ makes of it! This was the only 
clause of the Lord's Prayer on which, in His Sermon 
on the Mount, He commented. He said, '' For if ye 
forgive men their trespasses, your Heavenly Father 
will forgive you ; but if ye forgive not men their 
trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your tres- 
passes." Christ's religion is immensely different from 
men's religionism. They insist, with arrogant ex- 
clusiveness, on organizations, forms, rites, theological 



AS WE FORGIVE THEM THAT TRESPASS. 129 

shibboleths, and endless non-essential minutiae. Christ 
puts love in the forefront. 

Read His Parable of the Unmerciful Servant ; read 
His woes on the Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ; 
and see what He thinks of burdensome exactions and 
arrogant exclusiveness. Read the Parable of the 
Prodigal Son, and see what He thinks of those who 
would scatter with thorns the path of the tempted, 
and glare on the fallen with eyes full of hell. He 
makes the duty of mercy more pressing even than 
that of prayer. " If thou art offering thy gift at the 
altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath 
aught against thee, leave there thy gift before the 
altar; first be reconciled to thy brother." Read this 
awful displeasure against those who treat their breth- 
ren with taunts, and flouts, and gibes, and sneers, and 
insolent contempt, and think themselves fine and 
clever for doing it. The religionism of man often 
degenerates till it is half arrogant usurpation, and 
half paltry externalism; the religion of Christ is 
humility and love. 

But this duty of forgiving love to our brethren is 
all the more necessary because it is so supremely 
difficult. It is difficult because it is entirely repug- 
nant to the stubborn depravity of our fallen nature. 
What two things most absolutely stamp the natural 
man? Are they not egotism and pride? Egotism: 
I, I, I ! They would fain have all things and all men 
revolve around themselves ; " they would break up 
the universe to make themselves a more comfortable 



130 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

footstool." They do not mind earning their daily 
bread in ways which make others utterably miserable, 
or even drown them in destruction and perdition. 
And pride — it is most insolent in the meanest ; but it 
abounds in all of us. Men loom immensely large before 
themselves. They think far more of their rights than 
of those of others ; far more of their rights than of their 
duties. Exacting, we seize our fellow-servant roughly 
by the throat with our '' Pay me that thou owest." 
Impatient, we flame into anger at the smallest provo- 
cation. Sullen, we brood over injuries with implacable 
indignation. Resentful of the slightest opposition, 

' ' The small violence done 
Rankles in him, and ruffles all his heart, 
As the sharp wind that ruffles all day long 
A little bitter pool about a stone 
On the bare coast." 

Revengeful, we indulge in our coarse, vulgar " I'll 
pay him out"; "I'll put a spoke in his wheel"; 
*' He's not done with me " ; *' He'll find me even with 
him yet " ; *' I owe him two for that " ; '* He shan't 
insult me for nothing." All this, so far from being a 
thing to be admired, represents the vilest part of 
human nature. And yet there are men — men, too, 
who pose as Christians — who actually live in this sort 
of thing. Mere envy will do it. Has a man been 
successful? They feel injured by it; 

"And what with spites and what with fears 
They will not let a body be, 
It s always ringing in their ears, 

' They call this man as good as me.' " 



AS IVE FORGIVE THEM THA T TRESPASS. I 3 I 

I have known a man, out of mere jealousy, never 
miss an opportunity for a quarter of a century of 
sneering at one or two trivial oversights of a rival. I 
have known a man who, conceiving himself to have 
received a small but well-merited rebuff, has set 
himself for years to be revenged. I have known a 
man nurse the tiny cockatrice- egg of unforgiveness 
till it has burst into the fiery serpent of crime. There 
are some unhappy men, says Lord Macaulay, " con- 
stitutionally prone to the darker passions, to whom 
bitter words are as natural as snarling and biting to a 
ferocious dog ; and to come into the world with this 
mental disease is a greater calamity than to be born 
blind or deaf." And yet men pride themselves on 
this disease, calling their brutaHty honesty, and their 
spite frankness! 

Alas ! alas ! we are here face to face with the dead- 
liest phase of human nature, yet of which a public 
man at any rate sees the proofs every day. It is the 
work of the devil ; for *' to render good for evil is 
Godlike; to render evil for good is fiendlike." And 
yet " Man is to man the sorest, surest ill." Not only 
does manhood abound in *' the little hearts that know 
not how to forgive," but even in the little hearts that 
have in them no spark of fairness or of kindness ; the 
little hearts that delight in the safe and secret inflic- 
tion of pain, and if they can, of ruin, on those who 
have rebuked their vice, or touched their vanity, or 
stirred their envy, but which would not, even if they 
could, repay their evil deeds. 



132 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

And do not think that forgiveness js but a little 
thing. It is not easy to such as we are. The man 
who will frankly forgive his neighbor a wrong will 
not be the man who cruelly pains or wantonly injures 
him. Alas! even when we try to fulfil this duty, 
or think we do, we often deceive ourselves. Often 
our forgiveness is only semblable. *^ I forgive you as 
a Christian," says Cedric in '' Ivanhoe." "Which 
means," says the jester Wamba, ** that he does not 
forgive her at all." 

** Forgive? How many will say forgive and find 
A sort of absolution in the sound 
To hate a little longer.!* " 

And often our forgiveness is only skin deep, as 
when we say : *' I forgive what you have done, but 
I can never forget it." 

And how often our forgiveness is merely contempt- 
uous and disdainful ; as when the tyrant Dionysius 
sent to Plato and asked him not to abuse him at 
Athens for the wrongs he had inflicted, and Plato 
haughtily answered that " He had other things to do 
than to think of Dionysius." And how often our 
forgiveness is only quantitative. We ask, '' How 
often must I forgive? " We say, '' I cannot possibly 
forgive such repeated offences." Ah! God's for- 
giveness is not like that. We must forgive daily, as 
He forgives us daily ; not seven times, but seventy 
times seven. We need daily cleansing from daily 
defilement by the spirit of hatred, as from all our 
other sins of word and deed. 



AS WE FORGIVE THEM THAT TRESPASS. I 33 

And how often we cannot forgive at all, as when 
Queen Elizabeth, if the tale be true, said to the 
Countess of Nottingham, who confessed that she had 
kept back the ring by which Essex pleaded for for- 
giveness, " God may forgive you, but I cannot." 

"Forgiveness was his theme; and lo! 
What w®rds with eloquence aglow! 
And yet, upon his homeward way, 
He met relentlessly that day 
An ancient enemy who pled 
Forgiveness for an ill long dead : 
And with quick words with wrath aglow 
He silenced his repentant foe." 

Alas! all this will not do. Our forgiveness must 
be real; it must be ex animo; it must reserve no 
spite or grudge ; it must utterly clear itself of all ill- 
will and desire of revenge. It must be like that re- 
lated by the great novelist in '' St. Ronan's Well," 
where Clara Mowbray, her life ruined and blighted, 
her very reason unhinged, is summoned to the dying- 
bed of Hannah Irwin, who, never having been wronged, 
and always kindly treated by her, has blasted all her 
happiness by an undiscovered lie, but in the hour of 
death implores her forgiveness. '* Hannah Irwin," 
said Clara, with her usual sweetness of tone, '' my 
early friend, my unprovoked enemy, betake thee to 
Him who has pardon for us all, and betake thee with 
confidence, for I pardon you as freely as if you had 
never wronged me, as freely as I desire my own par- 
don. Farewell, farewell." The poor, wronged, human 



134 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

soul that by Christ's spirit can so forgive may indeed 
humbly plead, " Forgive us our trespasses, for we 
also forgive." 

There are two reasons why Christ, unlike human 
teachers, lays such tremendous, such primary, such 
ail-but- exclusive stress on a spirit which has more to 
do with our salvation than if we performed whatever 
churchly ceremonies in modern times would most 
nearly correspond to building seven altars, and offer- 
ing on every altar a bullock and a ram. He did so 
for oiLT own sakes ; He did so for the sake of the 
world He came to save. 

He did so for our own sakes. As nothing diffuses 
in the heart a purer sweetness than to forgive, so no 
pool of Marah water is deeper, more bitter, more 
desolating than a spite, or grudge, or implacable 
hatred, or unforgiven wrong. It poisons the whole 
heart. I know how bitter a man must feel it to re- 
ceive wrongs at the hands of others which might 
fairly be regarded as intolerable ; to be thwarted, to 
be secretly undermined, to be basely, and systemat- 
ically, and for years together misrepresented, to be 
secretly stabbed in the back by poisoned daggers and 
unseen hands, to receive nothing but unkindness after 
a life which has striven habitually to do kind deeds. 
Yet, even under these circumstances, and they are 
by no means uncommon, the duty of magnanimity, 
of returning good for evil, of ungrudging forgiveness, 
is blessedly inexorable. 

We shall not know the infinite sweetness of finding 



AS WE FORGIVE THEM THAT TRESPASS. 135 

Christ until we have learnt from Him the Christlike 
spirit. If there be bliss, if there be peace on earth, 
it is when we rise above earth's sulphurous fogs and 
chilling mists to the sunlit hills of the charity which 
suffereth long, and is kind, and is not easily provoked, 
and thinketh no evil. When we live in the spirit of 
St. Paul's injunction, *' Be ye kind one to another, 
tender-hearted, forgiving each other, as God also, in 
Christ forgave you ; " when we remember that, what- 
ever others say, Christ taught, " I say unto. you, Love 
your enemies, do good to them that hate you, pray 
for them that despitefully use you and persecute 
you ; " then, and not till then, shall we have entered 
that heaven which only seems so far away because 
so few of us will enter its open door. 

And Christ dwelt on the necessity of the spirit of 
love, not for our sakes only, but for the sake of the 
world. For there is nothing which would so much 
alleviate the throbbing pang of the world's deadly 
hurt as the spirit of love. And this prayer pledges 
us to nothing less. For if it inculcates forgiveness of 
injuries, how does it brand that needless, that wanton, 
that deadly, that incessant infliction of injuries of 
which the world is full! How can any man pray 
this prayer who, all his life long, has the poison of 
asps under his lips? — who lives by, and battens on, 
and delights in his own envy, spite, and malice? — 
who *' feeds fat " his hatred with wrongs done to his 
neighbor — often his innocent and unoffending neigh- 
bor — by word and by deed? Oh! that we could 



136 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

turn the eyes of many men upon themselves, and let 
them see how utterly base their lives are. They live 
by inflicting injury. They live by giving pain. How 
can they pray ''Forgive as we forgive"? Ah! this 
prayer requires nothing less than that we should walk 
before God with a perfect heart. For this prayer 
pledges us to repudiate all murder, anger, adultery, 
theft, slander, and whatever other evil to our neighbor 
there may be. 

Take two last remarks — one of warning, one of 
consolation. 

The warning is, that if we do not try to act up to 
this prayer, in uttering it we fatally condemn our- 
selves. If we do not forgive, we actually offer the 
horrible prayer that we may not be forgiven. For, 
as Luther says, '' When thou say est * I will not for- 
give,' and standest before God with thy precious 
paternoster, and mumblest with thy mouth * Forgive 
us our debts as we forgive our debtors,' what is that 
but saying ' I do not forgive him, and so do not Thou 
forgive me. Thou hast told me to forgive, and rather 
than obey I will renounce Thee, and Thy heaven, 
and all, and be the devil's forevermore ' ? " 

But, lastly, is there not supreme consolation in this, 
that if we love, we shall be loved ? that if we forgive, 
we shall be forgiven? ''If we forgive our brethren 
from our hearts, we may be assured that God will 
forgive us." It pleases Him "to accept our stubble 
for His wheat." We cannot lift holy hands unless 
we do so without wrath and dissension. But if we 



AS WE FORGIVE THEM THAT TRESPASS. 137 

do this, we are qualified for mercy, and shall obtain 
it from God. His heart is not harder than ours. If 
we love our brethren, " he that abideth in love abid- 
eth in God, and God abideth in him." If His grace 
can make otir hard hearts so soft, what may we not 
hope of Him who is all compassion? 

My friends, if you will but try to translate these 
thoughts into action, you will cease to think them 
commonplace. They will become precious ; they will 
become divine. Take them home with you. Have 
you a grudge against any one ? drive the base thing 
with knotted scourges out of the temple of your 
heart : have you an enemy ? forgive him before this 
sun sets. If your life is constantly causing unhappi- 
ness, and temptation, and humiliation to your brother 
men, instead of making them stronger and happier, 
oh, repent and amend that life, for it is not life, but 
clammy death. Then will this clause of the Lord's 
Prayer gleam out for you like the mystic light on 
Aaron's breast, "ardent with gems oracular." Then 
will you be happy as the sunny and loving heart 
always is, as the bitter and selfish heart never can be. 
Then shall ye be true children of your Father which 
is in heaven, '' for He maketh His sun to shine on the 
evil and on the good, and sendeth rain upon the just 
and on the unjust." 



AND LEAD US NOT INTO TEMP- 
TATION. 



139 



And lead us not into temptation. 

St. Matthew vi. 13. 

WE have seen that, of the seven petitions of the 
Lord's Prayer, the three first refer to the Holi- 
ness, the Kingdom, the Will of God ; the four next 
to the Needs, the Sins, the Temptations, the Perils 
of Men. 

Of these petitions, one only is at all for temporal 
necessities. The others all bear upon our soul's wel- 
fare. We pray for sustenance in the present, for for- 
giveness in the past; but forgiveness in the past 
would be useless unless God gave us strength for the 
future also. The sequel to " Thy sins be forgiven 
thee " is " Go, and sin no more." Therefore — seeing 
that while life lasts temptation lasts, and with temp- 
tation the possibilities of moral ruin, and in that war- 
fare there is no discharge — we daily pray '' Lead us 
not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." 

Let us first explain this petition, Lead tis not into 
temptation, and then apply it by trying to understand 
(i) the sources; (2) the methods; and (3) the way to 
escape temptation. We must do it as briefly and 
simply as we can, for the subject is very large. 

141 



142 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

For ''Lead us not," the Revised Version has the 
more accurate rendering, ''Bring us not." But does 
God ever bring us into temptation? Does not St. 
James write, " Let no man say when he is tempted, 
' I am tempted of God,' for God is untempted of evils, 
neither tempteth He any man " ? 

The explanation is very simple. It lies in the two 
senses of the word '' temptation." It means " trial," 
the conditions meant to test our faithfulness ; and it 
means actual incitement, seduction, inducement, al- 
lurement in the direction of wrong- doing. Now, in 
the first sense, God does tempt us ; He tries us as 
gold in the fire is tried. In this sense He tempts us 
because He has placed us in a world wherein we are 
of necessity surrounded by evil influences, and be- 
cause He has endowed us with a nature which, what- 
ever it may once have been, is now, at any rate, 
weakened and corrupt, and prone to sin. But God 
only brings us into temptation because He can bring 
us safely out. God never tries to make us do wrong. 
On the contrary, He brings to bear every gracious 
influence, human and divine, to keep us unseduced 
by wrong. 

" Lord, with what care hast Thou begirt us round! 

Parents first season us ; then schoolmasters 
Deliver us to laws ; they send us bound 

To rules of reason, holy messengers, 
Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin, 

Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes, 
Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in, 

Bibles laid open, millions of surprises, 



AND LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION. 1 43 

Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness, 
The sound of glory ringing in our ears, 

Without our shame, within our consciences, 
Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears " — 

all these powers does God bring to bear upon us as 
so many dissuasives, bulwarks, warnings against sin. 
If we sin in spite of them, it is only, alas ! because, in 
the fatal force and fascination of evil, 

"All these fences, and their whole array. 
One cunning bosom-sin blows quite away." 

Let no man, then, blasphemously murmur against 
God, Why hast Thou made me thus ? He has made 
us thus for the highest good and blessing of our race. 
Man achieves his utmost nobleness by victory over 
temptation. Through temptation he is sanctified. 
Temptation is God's winnowing-fan. If there were 
no tem.ptation to sin, there would be no glory of 
righteousness. Were virtue a thing compulsory and 
inevitable in us, then virtue itself would be valueless. 
And so St. James says, '' Brethren, count it all joy 
when ye fall into divers temptations." Why does 
God in this sense tempt us ? It is of His love ; it is 
for our good. Why do you send — why does the 
most loving and tender mother send — her young son 
to a public school ? We parents know perfectly well 
that at school our sons will meet with many and 
serious temptations ; temptations by which, if they 
yield, they will be terribly, perhaps even fatally, 
injured. Should we not think it monstrous if a son. 



144 ^^-^ LORD'S PRAYER, 

whom we tried with all our might to train in the 
nurture and admonition of the Lord, were to turn 
round upon us and say, *' Why did you send me to 
a public school?" Would not the answer be, "'My 
son, I sent you to school because I knew it to be 
best for you." You cannot escape temptation any- 
where ; not even in a cloister or a cave. The inno- 
cence of mere ignorance is impossible, and would be 
but a poor thing at the best. 

God never meant us to be, and has made it im- 
possible that we should be, artificially, screened from 
temptation ; He meant that we should face and over- 
come it. Temptation is not sin. 

" 'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, 
Another thing to fall." 

Temptation resisted is virtue ; it is victory ; it is a 
spring of new power, as the Indian warrior believes 
that the strength of his slain enemy passes into his 
own arm. No power in heaven or on earth, or under 
the earth, can make us sin. If we sin, we do so of 
our own free will. ''The elder," says Luther, ** said 
to a youth who complained that he was assailed by 
evil thoughts, ' My son, thou canst not prevent the 
birds of the air from flying over thy head, but thou 
canst prevent them from building their nests in thy 
hair.' " The youth in the great tragedy says, ''What 
.should I do? I confess it is my shame, but it is not 
in my virtue to amend it." What is lago's answer 
to his weak complaint? "Virtue? a fig! 'Tis in 



AND LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION. 145 

ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are 
our gardens, to which our wills are gardeners ; so 
that if we will plant nettles and sow herbs, set hyssop 
and weed up thyme, have it sterile with idleness, or 
manured with industry, why the power and corrigible 
authority of this lies in our wills. If the balance of 
our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another 
of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our nature 
would conduct us to most preposterous conclusions. 
But we have reason to rule our raging natures, our 
carnal stings, our unbitted lusts." 

And, happily, we have something more divine than 
reason to control us. We have conscience, the voice 
of God, to warn us ; we have the invisible grace of 
God to strengthen us ; we have the restraining Spirit 
of God to hold us fast. If we fall, we fall by our 
own folly, our own weakness, our own guilt. 

God, then, tries us, but He does not tempt, and 
our prayer is that we may not turn His trials into 
Sataiis allurements : His fire, which purges, into 
Satan's, which consumes. 

Let us next see whence comes temptation. It has 
not one source, but three. 

I. It comes from that terrible power of external 
evil which we call the devil. *' Be sober, be vigilant," 
says St. Peter, '' because your adversary, the devil, 
like a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he 
may devour." All temptations may come from 
him, but especially those universal ones of pride, 
selfishness, passion, hatred, Hes, unbelief, irrever- 



146 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

ence, self-will, which constitute his horribly perverted 
nature. 

2. And temptation comes from the world, its near- 
ness, its menacing noise, the fear which it inspires, 
the spell which it exercises, its splendid illusiveness, 
the lust of the eyes, the braggart vaunt of life. 

3. And it comes most often of all from the flesh. 
"Every man," says St. James, *' is tempted when he 
is drawn aside of his own lust and enticed." This is 
the force which temptation derives from our corrupt 
nature, with the fatal bias of its long heredities of 
evil. And this infection of nature, as our Article 
says, doth remain, yea, in them that are regenerate, 
whereby the lust of the flesh, called in Greek ?pp6v'rj{ia 
aapxoc; — i.e., concupiscence, sensuality, the affection, 
the desire of the flesh — is not subject to the law of 
God. 

Observe, then, the manifoldness and immensity of 
the perils in which we are placed! We are walking 
through a wilderness wherein are things creeping 
innumerable, both small and great beasts. We find 
laqueos tibique — snares and gins and traps on every 
side. We are never alone, never without an enemy, 
for we carry with us everywhere ourselves. Every- 
where, even to the monkish cloister, even to the secret 
chamber, even to the desert island, we carry our own 
lusts, and passions, and desires, and fatal propensities, 
and deadly besetting habits, and the great deep of 
our own evil and deceitful hearts, so that the bad 
man is forced to say of himself : 



AND LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION. lA^'] 

" Which way I fly is hell, myself am hell; 
And in the lowest deep a lower deep 
Still yawning to devour me opens wide, 
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven!" 



and even the good man must plead to God with all 
his might : 

" God harden me against myself, 
This traitor with pathetic voice 
Which craves for ease, and rest, and joys ; 
Myself arch-traitor to myself, 
My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe. 
My clog whatever road I go." 

But Satan is not content even with the multitudi- 
nous temptations which come to us naturally from 
the desires of the flesh and of the mind. He never 
lets us alone except when his work is so effectually 
done that he thinks he can safely leave us to be our 
own destroyers. He will try us in all ways, now 
one, now another. If he cannot storm the portcullis 
he will sneak in by the unguarded wicket-gate. He 
will not cease tempting us till he has found out the 
secret of where we are weakest, and has shot his last 
fiery dart. It does not in the least matter to him in 
what way we fall, be it by fleshly indulgence, or 
worldly ambition, or spiritual pride ; enough for him 
if we do but fall. How much, then, does our whole 
nature need to be strengthened — how unceasingly 
should our whole life be under holy guard ! 

These, then, being the sources of temptation, how 
do they approach us? How do they act upon us? 



148 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

They come in two ways : by stealthy witchery or in 
sudden furious assaults. 

1. The type of the first is the adder. It comes 
noiselessly, gradually, insidiously, with the creeping 
glide, with the almost imperceptible motion of a ven- 
omous thing, undulating through life's dry and fallen 
leaves, till, when it is quite close to us, and can catch 
at us unawares, it darts out at us its forked and flick- 
ering tongue. This represents the bewitchment, the 
glamour, the slow depraving fascination of sin. 

2. The type of the second is the wild beast. Some- 
times when we fancy ourselves most secure the temp- 
tation to some deadly sin crashes out suddenly upon 
us like a panther from its lair, with flaming eyes and 
lashing spring and thick carnivorous roar. In one 
unexpected moment we find ourselves engaged in 
fiercest conflict with this temptation which has leapt 
upon us, *' terrible and with tiger's leaps." Woe 
unto us if it find us unprepared to resist ! Woe unto 
us if the " tempting opportunity " has confronted 
with fatal suddenness ^' the susceptible disposition"! 
This represents the violence, the fury, the raging as- 
sault of sin. 

Surely, then, my friends, you will see the awful 
necessity for this daily prayer, " Lead us not into 
temptation " ; the awful significance of our Saviour's 
warning, '* Watch and pray, lest ye enter into temp- 
tation." And blessed are we if we feel, all our lives 
long, that this petition, like each of the others, in- 
volves a vow and an effort. It pledges us in the 



AND LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION 1 49 

strongest way, if we would not make our prayer an 
insult and a blasphemy, to shun temptation by every 
means in our power. We cannot avoid the testing 
trial. In that sense temptation comes from God, and 
if it have only come to us in the path of duty, then 
we may fearlessly claim the promise, '' He shall give 
His angels charge over thee to keep thee in all thy 
ways " : and then, by our victory, alike over creeping 
and crashing assault, we shall fulfil Christ's prophecy, 
" Thou shalt tread upon the lion and the adder ; the 
yeung hon and the dragon shalt thou trample under 
thy feet." 

But God promises no such victory if we be careless, 
and prayerless, and defiant, and full-fed. Why do 
men fall so fearfully? Why are they so horribly 
ruined, so fearfully beguiled? The explanation is 
not that God tries, not even that Satan tempts, but 
that men themselves purposely linger in the neighbor- 
hood of temptation, wilfully dally and tamper with it. 
The warning against this begins with the very dawn 
of our race. Why did Eve eat the forbidden fruit ? 
Because she lingered near the forbidden tree, and 
gazed on it, and listened to the seductive whisper, 
till the look became the thought, and the thought 
the desire, and the desire the purpose, and the pur- 
pose the deadly act. Would Achan have become 
a thief of the accursed thing if he had not gloated 
on the ingot of gold and the Babylonish garment? 
Would David have become an adulterer, and a mur- 
derer, and a haunted and ruined man, if, on that 



I50 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

night of shame, he had turned otherwhere his unholy 
gaze? 

Some, it has been said, '' enter into temptation pre- 
sumptuously, to show their power; some curiously, 
to taste the allurement; some carelessly, taking no 
heed ; some imitatively, following where others go ; 
some pharisaically, pretending to glorify God by 
showing what His grace can do." But, alas! ''there 
is no necessary connection between entering into 
temptation and coming out of it." '' Impulses easy 
to subdue," says Rousseau, " drag us along without 
resistance. We yield to sHght temptations, of which 
we despise the danger. Insensibly we find ourselves 
in perilous positions, from which we can no longer 
deliver ourselves without heroic efforts which terrify 
us ; and at last we fall into the abyss, saying to God, 
* Why hast Thou made me so feeble ? ' But, in spite 
of ourselves, He answers to our consciences, * I made 
thee too weak to rise (by thine own power) out of the 
gulf, because I made thee strong enough never to 
fall therein.' " 

My friends, and, above all, you who are young, be 
sure of this : he who tampers with temptation is lost. 
There is but one rule about temptation; namely, 

" Think it as a serpent's egg, 
Which, hatched, would, as his kind, grow mischievous, 
And kill it in the shell." 

II is fugiendo pugnare. Like the Parthian warriors, 
we must overcome by flight. We must shun, not 



AND LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION. 151 

only sin, but every occasion, every incitement, every 
alluring seduction, every inward imagination by which 
Satan will strive to render sin attractive; nay, we 
must, to our best power, fly every vicinage and ap- 
proach to sin, otherwise Satan, with maddening in- 
sistence, will whisper, *' Yea, hath God said?" and 
" Ye shall not surely die," and ** Ye shall be as gods, 
knowing good and evil," and 

" Be mine, and sin's, for one short hour, and then 
Be all thy life the happiest man of men." 

And he knows that if he can but once make us have 
a part in him there will be terrible odds that he will 
clutch us tight and long, and drag us down to utter 
perdition. But God's rule — the only safe rule about 
temptation — is ''Avoid it, pass not by it, turn from 
it and pass away." It is " Let thine eyes look right 
on, and let thine eyelids look right before thee." It 
is " Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are 
the issues of life." It is '' Can a man take fire into 
his bosom and his clothes not be burned? Can one 
go upon hot coals and his feet not be burned?" It 
is " See that ye walk circumspectly — axpipoi)? — accu- 
rately, warily, carefully ; not as fools, but as wise, buy- 
ing up the opportunity, because the days are evil." 

But, oh, my friends! if it be folly and weakness 
and peril not to give temptation as wide a berth as 
possible, not to get out of the way of it, not to exor- 
cise by holy thoughts the base, perverted curiosity 
about it; and if the prayer, " Lead us not into temp- 



.:52 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

tation," pledges us to this; how does that prayer 
brand the guilt, the depravity, the insanity, of those 
who seek temptation ? who revel in temptation ? who 
roll it as a sweet morsel under the tongue? who go 
out of their way to provide, to create, to intensify, 
temptations for themselves ? If the righteous scarcely 
be saved — if they barely escape the wiles of the 
wicked one who strive and pray — with what fierce 
teeth shall they be mangled, with what envenomed 
claws shall they be rent, who deliberately feed the 
furious wild beasts of their own most animal passions ; 
who, by their own acts, add fuel to those devouring 
flames? 

Do not men purposely go among the bad compan- 
ions whose mutual wickedness makes sin grow hotter 
and more glaring by intolerable reflections? Does 
the miserable drunkard never take into his hands the 
intoxicating cup, which he knows he will not leave 
off drinking till it has brought his wretchedness to 
rags and ruin? Does the young man never begin to 
bet and gamble, and think that he can stop as soon 
as he likes? Does the unclean liver never inflame 
and pander to his own lowest lusts by the voluntary 
dwelling on foul imaginations, and by the literature 
of pollution, and the unclean imagery which is hor- 
rible depravement and spiritual death? Alas, alas! 
how can these not fall? They must fall; they must 
be ruined! They seek their own degradation and 
destruction. They are like the poor moths that rush 
to scorch themselves to death. They need no devil 



AND LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION 1 53 

to tempt. They are devils to themselves. Their 
own worst devils, they light the flames of their own 
self-consuming hells. Can these wilful and flagrant 
tempters of themselves pray, '' Lead us not into temp- 
tation " ? *' Son of Man, these men have set the 
stumbling-block of their iniquity before their face ; 
shall I at all be inquired of by them?" Must not 
their prayer rather be that, by whatever agonies, 
through whatever terrible retributions, God would 
pluck them, as brands half-consumed, out of the 
burning; rend them from the devil's grasp as the 
shepherd tears out of the mouth of the lion two legs 
and the piece of an ear? 

One last word. We pray, '' Lead us not into 
temptation," because there is an escape for every one 
of us. Christ overcame for us the threefold sources 
of temptation in their subtlest and most virulent form, 
to show us that we can, and how we can, conquer. 
He conquered the devil, because never, even in 
thought, had He suffered the spirit of evil to enter 
the precincts of His soul, so that He could say, *' The 
prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in 
Me." He conquered the appetites of the body by 
feeding on the bread of heaven, which is to do the 
will of God. He conquered the allurements of the 
world by the constant sense of the divine, the eternal 
life, which prevents a soul from imbruting itself in 
the unlawful impulses of that lower life which we 
share with the beasts that perish. He looked to His 
Father in heaven. He seized the sword of the Spir- 



154 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

it, which is the Word of God. And — having been 
tempted like as we are, though without sin — the Lord 
knoweth how to dehver them that are godly out of 
temptation. My friends, we are in danger; always 
in danger. Who can say how frightful at this very 
moment may be the peril of some soul among you ? 
Who can tell whether these very words of mine may 
not be God's appointed means to pluck you from the 
very edge of the horrible precipice ? Oh, awake to 
your danger! Awake, arise, or be forever fallen! 

And of this be w^e all sure, that if we do not watch 
and pray, none of us is safe at any time, none of us 
is safe from anything. Yet, if you be faithful, be not 
afraid. We may feel a high, unflinching courage, if 
we say with Jehoshaphat, "' We ha\-e no might against 
this great host that cometh against us, neither know 
we what to do; but our eyes are upon Thee." 

There never has any temptation overtaken us but 
such as is human, as is common to man, as may be 
overcome by man. No irresistible temptations ever 
will assail us. If we fall, we fall of our own depraved 
choice ; for with every temptation God also makes — 
not ''a way," as the Authorized Version has it — but 
'' tJie way to escape, that we may be able to bear it." 
And one way of escape is the daily heartfelt utterance 
of this prayer, and the daily vow which this prayer 
implies, and the daily effort to avoid and to resist 
with all our might the temptations against which we 
pray. 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 



155 



I. 

But deliver us from evil. 

St. Luke xi. 14. 

SOME have regarded this petition as part of the 
last; as nothing but a definition of what we 
mean by *' Lead us not into temptation." This, 
however, is a mistake. The prayer that we may not 
be brought into overwhelming temptation, is one 
thing; the prayer that God would deliver us from 
evil, would *' keep us from all sin and wickedness, and 
from our ghostly enemy, and from everlasting death," 
is quite another. The number seven was sacred, and 
this, the separate, seventh petition in the Lord's 
Prayer, comprehensively sums up all the res't. " Thus 
praying, we seek the final deliverance of the Church 
from whatever pollutes, of the world from whatever 
injures it, of our souls and bodies from everything 
which is their curse and destruction." Thus viewed, 
this last petition is the climax of the whole prayer. 
It is the chief, permanent, all-comprehensive longing 
of the believer. '' Whatever tribulation he suffers," 
says St. Augustine, " for this deliverance he groans ; 
in hope of this he weeps ; from this he begins ; with 
this perseveres ; uttering this he completes his prayer." 

157 



158 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

It is the universal cry of the human heart. When 
we pray ''Lead us not into temptatioii^'' we pray 
against ourselves ; our own soft treacheries and base 
rebellions. When we pray ''Deliver ns from evil,'' 
we pray against everything which ruins and makes 
us wretched ; against the slavery of sin ; against all 
the fury, cunning, and malignity of the devil or of 
man ; against blight and famine : 

" Wasted lands, 
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps 

and fiery sands, 
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships." 

It is against all the trouble, and pain, and confusion, 
worse than death, which sin has brought into the 
world we should uplift our souls in prayer. 

The existence of evil in the world is an insoluble 
mystery. It is one of the secret things of God. To 
account for it absolutely surpasses our finite capaci- 
ties. We never shall know" in this life why evil exists. 
In vain have philosophers brooded over it ; saints 
have wept and prayed over it in vain. It surrounds 
us like a wall of impenetrable darkness, on which the 
lifted torch of the poet and the odorous lamp of the 
sage have shed no gleam. Rage against it has driven 
some men into atheism ; some into pessimism ; some 
into the belief in an evil as well as a good God ; some 
into desperation, or the yet worse wretchedness of 
unclean living. Had it been possible to lift but one 
corner of this curtain, opaque as midnight, or to 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 159 

lighten this crushing burden of mystery, the Lord 
Jesus Christ, who has done all for us, would have 
done this for us. But it could not be. Something 
in the nature of things, something in the inexorable 
decrees of eternal destiny, rendered it impossible. 
"Verily, Thou art a God that hidest Thyself." If 
we are wise, we shall leave the mj^stery of the exist- 
ence of evil in the hands of that inscrutable God. It 
is as high as heaven — what canst thou do? Deeper 
than hell — what canst thou know? All things end 
in a mystery, and all things practically end in this 
mystery — Why does evil exist? 

But how^ever useless may be every attempt to 
throw the faintest light on the question why God, 
w^ho is almighty and all- merciful, permits the exist- 
ence of evil, the fact that He does so — the fact that 
evil is — is a tremendous reaHty. It is idle to brood 
on the mystery, but it is sheer madness to ignore it. 
There it is ; we meet it every day of our lives ; it is 
all around us. '' Everything has a crack in it " ; 
''something is wrong, there needeth a change." 

We look back at the primeval world, before man 
was. Those fearfully great lizards, those dragons of 
the prime — what is the meaning of their lethal armor, 
their jagged teeth, their rending talons, their heavy 
brutal jaws ? We look at savage man in his filthy, 
squahd, and sanguinary brutalism; we look at the 
deformed skulls and coarse flint implements of canni- 
bal tribes, which are the earliest relics of the human 
race. We read the Bible story how Paradise was 



l60 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

lost, and the fiery sword of the Cherubim gleamed 
before its undiscoverable door; how the first man 
and woman were the first tempter and transgressor ; 
how the first human child grew up to be a branded 
murderer, and the second child his murdered victim. 
We read how the chosen people became the slayer 
of its prophets, and how its apostate religionism cru- 
cified its Lord. We turn to the book of secular his- 
tory, and whose hand shall whiten those crimson pages 
glued together with the blood of myriads of battles, 
soaked through and through with the putrid staining 
of unnumbered crimes ? We look at the lives of the 
great and good, and see in them a long martyrology 
at the hands of the base and vile. We see contin- 
ually : 

" A doom that ever poised itself to fall, 
An ever-moaning battle in the mist, 
World-war of dying flesh against the life, 
The lowest ha^-ing power upon the highest, 
And the high purpose broken by the worm." 

W^e look Into our own hearts, and know their plague 
and darkness. We walk in the streets, and see 
thousands of faces lettered with the hieroglyphics of 
sorrow, or stamped with the brand of shame. We 
take up the newspaper of yesterday, and read of 
charity denounced by sneering cynicism, while men 
and women are slowly starving to- death amid the 
superfluities of boundless luxury ; of little children 
maimed, tortured, beaten, starved from day to day 
so slowly that none call it murder; of one English 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. l6l 

city in which twenty-four deaths were recorded on 
Christmas morning — six children suffocated; and 
nearly every death due to the foul and execrable 
curse of drink. We take up the journal of to-day, 
and read how a man and wife drink together all 
Christmas-eve, and fight and scuffle all night, and in 
the morning the wretched drunken woman is found 
lying kicked to death by her brutal drunken husband, 
a blood-stained hatchet lying on the floor, and his 
heavy boots soaked with blood. And in the same 
paper we read how the devilish dastardy of the Irish 
felon once more shatters buildings with dynamite, 
and blows into atoms the bodies of his innocent vic- 
tims. And these things, or things worse than these, 
are going on daily in Christian lands, though well- 
nigh nineteen hundred years have sped since heaven 
disclosed its dazzling minstrelsies at that first Christ- 
mastide to the soft silence of the listening night. Ah, 
God! 

" Can such things be 
And overcome us like a summer cloud, 
And not provoke our wonder? " 

We are living in a world of evil. From the moon 
which lights our skies, from stars burnt up and shat- 
tered in the boundless depths, from the earth wrink- 
led with graves, from the heart sick with cares, from 
nations poisoned with drink and disgraced by crime, 
from ** insane religion, degraded art, merciless war, 
detestable pleasure, and vain or vile hope " ; from 
the long records of humanity, so loud with waiHng, 



1 62 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

SO dim with tears, so red with blood, the truth is piti- 
lessly forced upon us that if good is, evil also is — evil 
terrible and not to be disguised. And even if we 
turn from man to inanimate nature, there, too, as our 
greatest writer has said, '' The blasted trunk, the bar- 
ren rock, the moaning of the bleak winds, the roar of 
the black, perilous, merciless whirlpools of the moun- 
tain streams, the continual fading of all beauty into 
darkness, and of all life into dust," teach us that 
Gerizim and Ebal, light and darkness, life and death, 
heaven and hell, divide the present existence of man 
even if, by God's power, the deadliest elements of 
evil shall be eliminated from his eternity. 

Realize the fact; shock your fastidiousness with 
it ; startle your sensual and selfish torpor with it ; let 
it scare the namby-pamby nullities of your religious 
conventionality ; let your '' rustling masquerade of 
life" be brushed by these hard realities of death; 
let the spectres of all this horrible phantasmagoria 
look in, hollow-eyed, upon your callous indifference 
or dainty sympathies. Do you fancy that you can 
escape evil by ignoring it ? Think you to get beyond 
its reach by lading yourself with the thick clay of 
mammon, or steeping your dead souls in sensualism ? 
Do you imagine that, in the midst of it all, God meant 
men to be apathetic as the beasts that perish, so long 
as there is carrion enough to feed their vulture appe- 
tites ? Life is a base, a brutal, a carnal dream to all 
whose deeds are swelling the sum of this evil ; to all 
whose hearts are not troubled by it ; to all who are 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 163 

not doing their utmost to fight against its causes ; to 
all who do not cry to God with something of heart- 
felt passion, '' That it may please Thee to have mercy 
upon all men." 

''Our Father, deliver tis from evil.'' What I mainly 
want, then, is to arouse you from the life of sin, from 
the life .of selfishness, from the torpor of dead con- 
sciences, from the lulling mummery of sham religi- 
osity, to some sense of the fact that while we live we 
are, every soul of us, in peril from the existence and 
the assaults of evil. 

How does Scripture describe our life? In its 
brevity, as the withering grass, as the fading flower, 
as a mist, a vapor, a dream when one awaketh ; as 
the shadow of a bird's wing in the summer noon ; as 
the flight of an arrow through the air; as the path- 
way of a boat's keel in the glassy wave: — but in its 
need for energy and watchfulness, in its desperate 
danger for all who live with the ungirded loins and 
the unburning lamp, as a warfare in which there is 
no discharge, a wrestling, not against flesh and blood, 
but against principalities and powers ; as the sleepless 
watch of a sentinel in a beleaguered fortress ; as the 
toil of a husbandman ; as the agonizing of an athlete ; 
as a brief journey through a great and terrible wilder-- 
ness, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both 
small and great beasts. It may be that some have 
come here to-day utterly blind to all spiritual peril, 
utterly content with their worthlessness ; living lives 
of cruel indifference to the curse they inflict on others 



1 64 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

by their lust or by their Hes : — and God may be let- 
ting them alone. 

But if of all those now present any young man is 
here to-day who is a fornicator or a profane person, 
as Esau, who sold his birthright, what darkened 
understanding, what corroded conscience, what penal 
blindness scattered over forbidden lusts, what be- 
witchment of the devil, has made him so insensate a 
fool as to think that he alone of all mankind is to be 
an exception to the absolutely exceptionless experi- 
ence of the world, which is that physical evil, in all 
its terrible varieties, has been inextricably linked to 
moral evil; that he who sows the wind shall reap the 
whirlwind ; that though hand join in hand, the wicked 
shall not go unpunished; that neither he nor any 
wilful sinner shall escape the fearful lex talionis of 
God's offended law, '' Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, 
hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, 
wound for wound, stripe for stripe"? ''You feel 
none of all this; you fear none of all this," you inso- 
lently reply. No ! but how shall it be when the evil 
you have committed holds you in its merciless clutch ? 
when the pleasure-boat of your life, which now seems 
to glide so smoothly between bright shores, is in the 
grasp of the rapids and hurried towards the horrible 
cataract? How shall it be when the chance spark of 
your sin has wrapped in conflagration the whole horizon 
of your life, and you can scarcely be saved from that 
billowing ring of flame, whose flakes, it may be, have 
begun already to fall thick upon your wasted years? 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 1 65 

" Oicr Father, deliver 2is from evil.'' I shall have 
more to say to you on this petition hereafter, but now 
I would impress on every one of you, be he smooth 
Pharisee or be he guilty publican, the grim reality 
of our personal peril from this universal evil against 
which we pray. And in this respect it makes no 
difference whether we pray '' Deliver us from evil," 
or, as it is rendered in the Revised Version, "' Deliver 
us from the Evil One." It would be unfit to enter 
here into the uncertain question which is the right 
rendering. Suffice it that the Greek may mean 
either, and that it is not from the Greek words that 
we can decide the question ; but in either case the 
one rendering involves the other. 

Deliver us from the Evil One. 

Has it ever occurred to you to think in what lurid 
gleams Scripture sets forth to us the work of that liv- 
ing malignity ? Is there nothing to alarm us, even 
in his names ? He is Satan, the Enemy, the Adver- 
sary, the only enemy whom we need to fear. He is 
the Tempter, seducing, alluring, deceiving, undermin- 
ing, entrapping, terrifying us into sin. Then, from 
the smiling, soft-voiced tempter, he springs at once 
into the devilish Accuser, branding, blackening, blast- 
ing us with the very sins into which he led us. Then 
he becomes Apollyon, the Destroyer, '' straddling 
quite over the whole breadth of our path in hfe," 
scorching us with his envenomed breath, heaping 
upon us his fiery darts, suffocating us under his 
dragon's wings. A liar, and the father of it ; a mur- 



1 66 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

derer from the beginning; full of subtile wiles and 
infinite devices ; sowing tares in our hearts ; dangling 
before us his gilded lures, and when his hook has 
lacerated us, dragging us out to gasp and die upon 
the shore ; creeping to us like a poisonous serpent, 
with noiseless glide through the fallen leaves of our 
lost innocence, or bounding out in one crashing leap 
upon us with flaming eyes, Hke a w41d beast out of 
the tangled thicket of our follies. So he is described 
to us — never letting us alone, trying us at every point, 
persistently lying in wait at the weakest, sifting us 
with every temptation in turn, and at last fatally aware 
which is most certain to succeed. 

O ye sons of men, O ye women that are at ease, 
and ye careless daughters, is this an enemy that you 
— you so weak and frail, so prone to guilt, and already, 
it may be, tied and bound by the chain of your evil 
habits — can afford to despise? He is well content 
that you should do so, for your contempt is his vic- 
tory ; but oh ! awake in time to the sense of this your 
peril, and cry with all your hearts to Him who alone 
can save you. 

Deliver us from the Evil One. Otherwise it has 
been truly said, '' We are never safe ; the very stub- 
ble of our old sins may run into our eyes and blind 
us ; the dregs of them may choke us ; the ashes of 
them may kindle again and consume us. Therefore 
do we always need God's present help, so that the 
prince of this world may be judged in us also, even 
as He was judged by our Lord." 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 167 

But perhaps you are a fine young man, or a fine 
young lady, who consider yourself far too philosoph- 
ical to believe in the existence of the Evil Spirit. You 
may have been taught to say by the fine cynics and 
agnostics of the world that the existence of the devil 
is a belief only of the vulgar ; a piece of late Hebrew 
mythology, absurd and impossible, borrowed by the 
Jews from the Babylonians during their exile. Very 
well, if it is so, so be it. I shall not stop to argue 
that matter with you. 

Satan is very glad that you should disbelieve in 
him. There is nothing which pleases him better than 
to fool you to the top of your bent by shamming 
dead ; unless it be to pass himself off as an Angel of 
Light, in the guise of numbing forms and narcotic 
dogmas. 

Whether evil be a thing in the abstract, or a person 
in the concrete, evil is ; and it is infinitely necessary 
that we should cry daily with all our hearts '' Deliver 
us from the Evil," lest we should be overthrown and 
destroyed by it. The root of all evil, and the source 
of all evil, and that which transforms itself for us into 
every issue and manifestation of evil, is sin. It is 
against sin, against the subtlety of sin, against the 
glamour of sin, against the deceitfulness, against the 
exceeding sinfulness of sin, that I would aim every 
word of warning which I have uttered in your ears 
this day. I entreat you to take this warning to your- 
selves. 

What the deliverance is, whence it comes, how it 



1 68 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

is effected, we must consider hereafter. Only now 
let me ask, Do you indeed desire that ere this dawn- 
ing year has closed it should find you better, purer, 
holier? 

" Here in the body pent 
Afar from Him I roam ; 
Yet nightly pitch my mo%-iug tent 
A day's march nearer home." 

On this day you are far nearer — shall I call it home or 
doom ? — than you were on this day last year. Perhaps 
on New Year's Day a year hence you will not be sitting 
in this church, but mouldering in your grave. Per- 
haps by that tim.e '' mercy will have played her part, 
and vengeance have leaped upon the stage," and the 
short comedy shall have been followed by a long and 
infinite tragedy. But how if this day next year should 
find you living indeed, but living in a deeper death ; 
not a year's march nearer home, but a year's march 
lost more hopelessly in the trackless desert? 

Ah! the one evil, the master-evil, the sole evil 
which our own perverted will can render irremediable, 
is the evil of the guih of our own hearts. Are you 
conscious of any one sin, any one sinful habit, which 
you will not give up ? Has avarice, or lust, or malice, 
or worldliness, got firm possession of you ? Ah ! then 
you are as yet in the power of evil and of the E\il 
One. 

How can you be delivered? God has provided, 
God has promised us deliverance. But how shall 
it become our deliverance ? How habitually do we 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 169 

Ignore the lesson which the Church means to incul- 
cate by calling our attention always on the first day 
of the year to Christ's circumcision! Did she not 
mean thereby to teach us that the way of deliverance 
from our own evil is by pain, by effort, by self-repres- 
sion, by the circumcision of our heart and all our 
members ? You will never be delivered from evil by 
somnolence and self-indulgence. 

" Not on flowery beds, nor under shade 
Of canopy reposing, heaven is won." 

The only w^ay to gain that deliverance is to strive 
against all that is wicked in ourselves and others, and 
to pray with all our hearts, " Our Father, dehver us 
from evil, deliver us from the Evil One." Awake, 
then, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead. 
How long will you fatally procrastinate? To-day is 
yours ; you know not whether to-morrow will be. 
Now is the accepted time ; now is the day of salva- 
tion. To-day, if ye will hear God's voice, harden 
not your hearts. 



11. 

But deliver us from evil. 

St. Matthew vi. 13. 

MY last sermon was devoted to the endeavor to 
bring home to every soul among us the reality 
and awfulness of the evil which is in the world ; and 
the attitude of burning antagonism towards it, defiance 
of its menaces, scorn of its seductions, which it ought 
to be the object of our Hves to assume. I desire, this 
afternoon, to join with you in trying to understand 
more specifically what our Lord meant by " the evil " 
from which, in this petition, we pray to be delivered, 
and what light His prayer throws upon it. 

Evils — things to which we all rightly give that 
name — abound on every side. There is no single life 
of man, from that of the king upon his throne to that 
of the beggar on the dunghill, which is not touched 
by them. Half the practical philosophy of man has 
been directed to the question how we should regard, 
how we should deal with them. 

The Epicureans, identifying evil with discomfort, 
regarded the culture of personal pleasure and the 
avoidance of personal pain as the end of life. They 

171 



172 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

thus committed the fatal errors of making self-interest 
the basis of right and wrong, and of practically leav- 
ing man as much exposed to calamities as ever, but 
without the divine heroism which can face and con- 
quer them. For the man who tries to play hide-and- 
seek with things disagreeable does not thereby escape 
them. If he shirks his duties because they seem 
painful, he gets the pain all the same with no support 
from duty — ''bitter herbs and no bread with them." 
The other great sect of heathen philosophers, the 
Stoics, fell into an opposite error, though a much 
nobler one. They taught rightly that obedience to 
the moral law is the end of life ; and that, in compar- 
ison with this, all else is insignificant. But, pushing 
this view to extremes, they tried to persuade them- 
selves that pain is no evil, and earthly happiness is no 
good. Their protest against the moral disorder and 
wickedness of the world was heroic, but it was in- 
efficient. It could inspire fortitude, but not joy ; 
courage, but not hope ; resignation, but not peace. 
To make believe that pain and want and sickness 
are not evils was to put too great a strain on human 
nature. Such a belief could only be arrived at by 
crushing out some of man's sweetest emotions, and 
tearing away some of his finest instincts. 

Christianity fell into neither error. It recognized 
evil things as evil ; it laid no check on the natural 
movements of human feeling. Christ wept aloud 
over fallen Jerusalem ; He shed silent tears by the 
grave of Lazarus ; He sighed deeply when He wit- 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 173 

nessed the disabilities of the afflicted ; He groaned 
with indignation for the hardness of men's hearts. 
And He taught us a more excellent way. It was to 
connect all real evil with sin and wickedness, and to 
regard all pain and sorrow as pain indeed and sorrow, 
but as so incommensurate with wrong- doing as to 
become nothing in comparison with it. 

*' There are so many things wrong and difficult ifi 
the world," says the noble-hearted lady to her boy, 
in a great work of fiction, '' that no man can be great 
— he can hardly keep himself from wickedness — un- 
less he gives up thinking much about pleasures and 
rewards, and gets strength to endure what is hard 
and painful. And so, my Lillo, if you mean to act 
nobly, and seek to know the best things God has put 
within reach of men, you must learn to fix your mind 
on that end, and not on what will happen to you be- 
cause of it. And, remember, if you were to choose 
something lower, and make it the rule of your life to 
seek your own pleasure and escape from what is dis- 
agreeable, calamity might come just the same, and it 
would be calamity falling on a base mind, which is the 
one form of sorrow that has no balm in it, and that 
may well make a man say, ^ It would have been better 
for me if I had never been born.' " 

Myriads of human beings have lived to say that, 
and many have even lived to curse the day of their 
birth, when the shattered bark of their lives has been 
flung by the tempests of agony or misfortune into 
that narrow place where two seas meet — where the 



174 



THE LORD'S PRAYER. 



sea of calamity meets the sea of crime. They have 
been in evil, and have not been delivered from it; 
but every one who has been taught by the spirit of 
Christ to understand that evil, in its ultimate essence, 
is nothing else but transgression, alienation from 
God, violation of the law of his being; every one 
who has refused, at all costs, to let the Evil One have 
any part in him ; every one who has prayed from his 
heart. Our Father, deliver us from evil, and has lived 
in the spirit of that prayer, has been delivered, is 
being delivered — not indeed from sorrow and sighing 
in this brief life — not from trial and" disappointment, 
and throbbing nerves, and a wounded heart — but 
from all that is essentially, from all that is utterly, 
incurably, and finally evil. 

So far from wishing that he had never been born, 
such a man, happy here even in the midst of anguish, 
and looking forward to a happiness without alloy, 
thanks God for having called him into being, as for 
His richest boon, and praises Him daily for his crea- 
tion and preservation, and all the blessings of his life. 
He can say without make-believe : 

" 'Mid all my store of blessings manifold 
I count this chief est, that my heart has bled." 

Brethren, have we learned this lesson ? Do we see 
how immense is the difference it makes in the mean- 
ing which we attach to the prayer, '' Deliver us from 
eviV ? Evil, in the form of pain, bereavement, sick- 
ness, loss, heartache, care, disappointment, or some 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. I 75 

other of its Protean varieties, comes without any excep- 
tion to every one of us. Evils, in their external form, 
happen alike to the good and to the bad, to the wise 
and to the foolish. This was a source of immense 
perplexity to many of the ancient patriarchs and 
psalmists. But has not Christ taught us the solution 
of the difficulty ? Has He not furnished us with a 
means of deliverance, and with countless living proofs 
of its efficacy ? To wicked men evils are evils in all 
their maHgnity — horrible, hopeless, not to be told. 
But in the midst of the very same evils, the good are 
so strengthened by grace, so illuminated with hope, 
that ''our light affliction which is for a momxCnt " is 
not to be compared with '* that far more exceeding 
and eternal weight of glory, while we look not at the 
things which are seen, but at the things which are 
not seen ; for the things which are seen are temporal, 
but the things which are unseen are eternal." 

Is the soul of God's saint among the lions? Lo! 
the jaw-bones of the lions are broken, and they cannot 
harm him! Is he plunged into some burning fiery 
furnace, heated seven times by the tyranny of man? 
Lo! the Son of Man stands by him in the furnace 
like the Angel of the Dew, and His spirit, '' like a 
moist whistling wind," breathes mercy into the flames. 
The sting of death, the sting of all evil, is sin. He 
whom God hath -delivered from that evil, and from 
the Evil One, finds that '' to suffer with Christ is not 
to suffer," and that *' in much affliction" there may 
still "be joy of the Holy Ghost." 



176 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

Do you ask for proofs, for instances, of this ? Why, 
the world is full of them ! 

I. On the one hand, thousands of pleasure-seekers 
and vicious men have told us the inevitable, incur- 
able misery which their- vice and love of pleasure 
brought them. Shall I quote to you the testimony 
of the free-thinker Diderot? 

"To do wrong," he says, "is to condemn our- 
selves; to live and find our pleasure with wrong- 
doers to pass an uncertain and troubled life in one 
long and never-ending lie ; to have to praise, with a 
blush, the virtue we fling behind us ; to seek a little 
calm in sophistical systems which the breath of a 
single good man scatters to the winds ; to shut our- 
selves forever out of the spring of true joys, the only 
joys which are virtuous and sublime ; to give our- 
selves up, simply as an escape from ourselves, to the 
weariness of merely frivolous diversions, in which the 
day flows away in demi- oblivion, and life glides slowly 
from us, and loses itself in waste." 

Lord Byron, in defiance of his better nature, gave 
himself up to debauchery and vice. If any man might 
have made much of life, what might not he have 
made — young, beautiful, beloved, gifted, nobly born ? 
What did he make of it? While still a young man, 
on his thirty-third birthday, he wrote — 

" Through life's dull road, so dim and dirty, 
I have dragged to three-and-thirty. 
What have these years left to me? 
Nothing except thirty-three!" 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 177 

He had gained no good certainly, and he had brought 
on himself the curse of premature and sated weari- 
ness. 

" My days are in the yellow leaf; 

The flowers and fruits of love are gone ; 
The worm, the canker, and the grief 

Are mine alone! 
The fire that on my bosom preys 

Is lone as some volcanic isle ; 
No torch is kindled at its blaze — 

A funeral pile." 

Is it not true, as the Jewish psalmist wrote three 
thousand years ago, " The wicked are like the troubled 
sea which cannot rest; whose waters cast up mire 
and dirt ; there is no peace, saith my God, to the 
wicked " ? Is it not true, as is written by the Chris- 
tian poet of to-day — 

*' Who follows pleasure, pleasure slays, 
God's wrath upon himself he wreaks ; 
But all delights attend his days 

Who takes with thanks, but never seeks." 

Perhaps the invariable experience of the world has 
sufficiently convinced you that vice means evil, and 
means misery. 

2. But do you wish a proof of the other side of 
my statement, that evils, which in themselves would 
be terrible and unmitigated, cease altogether to be 
evils when Christ is with us to help us bear them? 
Well, again I say, the world is full of proofs. Look 
at the abounding joy of St. Paul, the joy which rings 
like the reiterated jubilance of. a silver clarion through 



178 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

the epistles of his dreary Roman captivity. Take 
another poor" wandering self-denying missionary, far 
from home, among the heathen, smitten with the sun 
by day and the moon by night, '' scorched," he too, 
'' with the heat of Sirius, and tossed by the violence 
of Euroclydon " — St. Francis Xavier. 

" Yes, without cheer of sister or of daughter, 
Yes, without stay of father or of son, 
Lone on the land and homeless on the water, 
Pass'd he in patience till the work was done.' 

In the midst of the crime and squalor of earth's dark 
places, which are the habitations of cruelty, he, if any 
man, might have sunk into despondency. On the 
contrary, he wrote home that he was so happy, so 
exuberantly happy, that he sometimes almost prayed 
God to restrain that superabundance of beatitude 
which He was pouring upon his soul. 

In the last generation, a good clergyman, the Rev. 
Henry Venn, one day promised his children that he 
would take them to see the happiest man that he 
knew. To their astonishment he took them to a poor 
garret, in which lay a young man, indigent, and dy- 
ing of consumption, but with a joy which radiated 
through his whole countenance from the light of God 
which shone within him. There was nothing strange 
in this. That youth had in him a secret and source 
of joy in which, as by some heavenly alchemy, all 
evil is evaporated, or turned into purest gold. 

3. And this has been illustrated in whole societies. 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 179 

Turn to the Rome of the Caesars, and its own his- 
torians have to apologize for the monotony of its 
wretchedness, and to blush for the corruptions of its 
shame, amid a society beyond all precedent steeped 
in pleasure and in gorgeous luxury. Turn to the 
city beneath that city, where, in the subterranean 
catacombs, the infant Church hid her head amid ig- 
nominy, death, and tombs, and not only will you see 
nothing but emblems of the peace and joy which 
triumphed over misery and persecution, and which 
made exultation and glad simpHcity the two charac- 
teristics of the lives of the martyrs, but even on the 
humblest faces of its slaves and artisans, as sketched 
upon their graves, you will see the beauty of holiness 
which comes only from the peace of God. 

Deliver its from evil. . Is it not true that when we 
offer this prayer, we think most often of those earthly 
conditions which men count evil, but which, as we 
have seen, are to God's children but blessings in dis- 
guise ? If so, we utterly miss the spirit of this prayer, 
and the spirit of all Christ's teaching. What Christ 
meant by evil, what alone in its ultimate essence 
is evil, lies far behind these things. Wealth, rank, 
power, popularity, ease, pleasure, success — with blind 
folly we pursue these things and take them for good, 
but they do not constitute good ; the combination of 
them all may be coincident with deadliest evil. Sick- 
ness, obscurity, failure, abuse, hardship, poverty, do 
not constitute evil ; the combination of them all may 
be coincident with the most glorious good. 



l8o THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

Men shun poverty ; they toil, and moil, and lie, 
and cheat, and weary themselves in the very fire 
for money ; yet poverty may be a perfect blessing. 
Christ chose the lot of poverty. There has hardly 
been a great saint or benefactor of mankind who has 
not been poor; and often to be a millionaire has 
proved to be an utter curse, and to die a millionaire 
has been to die disgraced. There is a poverty, hon- 
est and noble, like that of Christ, which is transcend- 
ently preferable to riches ; a poverty which has " its 
sweet complete untainted happiness like the intermit- 
tent notes of birds before the daybreak, or the first 
gleams of heaven's amber in the eastern gray." 

** Come ye who find contentment's very core 
In the scant store 
And daisied path 
Of poverty, and know how more 
A small thing that the righteous hath 
Aboundeth than the ungodly's riches great." 

Again, we pray, and not unnaturally, against pain 
and sickness ; yet often the couch of the sufferer has 
been a scene of " joy, passing the joy of harvest, 
strange, solemn, mysterious even to its possessor." 
We desire, it may be, gratitude for services rendered, 
recognition, fame, popularity. We see every day 
how, in order to gain these things and the little inch- 
high distinctions which come of them, men will creep 
and crawl all their lives in the hedge bottoms; will 
carefully steer " between the Scylla and Char3^bdis of 
yes and no " ; will crouch and cringe before the in- 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. i8l 

Solent antagonisms of the world ; will even be afraid 
to stand by persecuted virtue, or to smite the cheek 
of blustering vice ; and all for what ? — to escape 
abuse, to win the world's lying praises, to gain the 
applause of intriguing cHques. Base cowardice ! and 
how doubly and trebly base when we see it among 
those whose very duty it is not to babble and com- 
promise, but nobly to rebuke vice and patiently suffer 
for the truth's sake. 

*' Beneath the heroic sun 
Is there then none 

Whose sinewy AA'ings by choice do fly 
In the fine mountain -air of public obloquy? 
Come up, come up and join our little band. 
Our time is near at hand. 
The sanction of the word's undying hate 
Means more than flaunted flags in windy air." 

Is there anything baser than to tnrive by cowardice 
and complaisance ? Christ said, " Woe unto you 
when all men shall speak well of you ; blessed are ye 
when all men shall reproach you and persecute you 
and say all manner of evil against you falsely for My 
sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is 
your reward in heaven ; for so persecuted they the 
prophets which were before you." And so, gener- 
ally, you see how infinitely far is Christ's estimate of 
evil from the estimate of the world. 

When trials come in the path of duty, when the 
thorn in the flesh is accompanied with the grace of 
God, God's child counts these things as passing trials, 



1 82 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

not as essential evils. They are only evil to the evil ; 
only evil to those in whom the root of evil is. Well 
have His saints learned His lesson. Nineteen hundred 
years ago an aged saint was being led to Rome by 
ten - rough Roman soldiers, whom he calls his ten 
leopards, to be thrown to the wild beasts in the 
amphitheatre. Was he unhappy? Did he account 
cruelty and martyrdom as evils? Nay! a fire of 
sombre joy burns through each of his seven letters, 
and in one of them he writes, " Come fire and iron, 
come grappHngs with wild beasts, cuttings and man- 
glings, the wrenching of my bones, the hacking of my 
limbs, the crushings of my whole body ; come cruel 
tortures of the devil to assail me, only be it mine to 
attain to Jesus Christ." 

What are these words of St. Ignatius but an echo 
of St. Paul's? "' What things were gain to me I have 
counted loss for Christ ; yea, more, I even account 
all things loss for the excellency of the knowledge 
of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered 
the loss of them all, and do count them but dross 
that I may gain Christ." How well the early Chris- 
tians understood these things, which we — cringing 
cowards and effeminate time-servers as we are — in 
this soft, sensuous, hyprocritic age, have so utterly 
forgotten. 

In the year 203, a fair young mother, named Per- 
petua, was in prison at Carthage. '' ' Have pity 
on thy babe,' they said to me ; ' have pity on the 
white hairs of thy father, and the infancy of thy 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 183 

child.' I replied, 'I will not' * Art thou then a 
Christian ? ' they asked ; and I answered, ' Yea, I 
am a Christian.' Then we were condemned to the 
wild beasts, and with hearts full of joy we returned 
to our prison." "Oh! my most dear God," said 
Luther — brave, noble old Martin, who was worth 
any thousand of the manikins who carp at him — '' I 
thank Thee that Thou hast made me poor and a beg- 
gar upon earth. Oh! my God, puni.sh me far rather 
with pestilence, with all the terrible sicknesses on 
earth, with war, with anything, rather than that Thou 
be silent to me." Ah! let us learn that what we 
pray against in this prayer which Christ has taught 
us, is not earthly loss or trial or calamity, but against 
the only real absolute evil which there is, the evil 
which comes from the Evil One, the evil which is in 
ourselves. From this we pray that we may be pro- 
tected ; out of this we pray that we may be delivered. 
This is '' the root of all other evils, whether penal or 
afflictive." 

And one deep lesson Christ inculcates as to the 
way of being delivered from it, is when He teaches 
us not to begin with earthly evils, not to think of 
earthly evils when we come to God; not to begin 
with self, not to think of self, but to begin with, to 
think of, our Father who is in heaven ; to begin with, 
to think of, to be absorbed in His name. His king- 
dom, His will, in the longing for spiritual sustenance, 
and forgiveness of our sins, and safety amid tempta- 
tion. When we approach evil through these avenues 



1 84 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

it scares us no longer. The lions of sin and death 
roar on either side of us, but they are chained. Un- 
less we do this, we may be led to desperately false 
and dangerous ways of trying to escape evils which 
are not evils. We may evoke Satan to cast out Satan, 
we may palter with God for gold, we may sell truth 
for popularity, we may barter duty for power, we 
may turn a cold shoulder on the unpopular, we may 
join the brutal multitude in trampling savagely on the 
fallen, we may abandon the cause of mihtant virtue 
for that of popular vice, we may turn traitors out of 
cowardice or courtesy, we may commit self-murder 
at last in utter self- disgust with our evil self. But 
when we look at evil solely in the Hght of God, when 
that which seemed terrible, because it was so mani- 
fold, is condensed into '* one thing only," and means 
nothing but opposition to God's will and transgression 
of His law, we shall regard no other evil as fatal. 
Our very sorrows will be beatitudes, for they will 
help to purge away the vile dross from us, and trans- 
mute us into purer gold. 

'* Before I was troubled," said the psalmist, ** I 
went wrong; but now will I keep Thy law." There 
is such a thing as welcoming tribulation when we 
know that God only sends it for our good. When 
the wise slave Lokman was seen eating a bitter melon 
which his master had given him, and was asked how 
he could do it, he answered, " My master has given 
me multitudes of good things. Should I not eat one 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 185 

bitter melon if it comes from his hand?" Has not 
the experience of many been what Wolsey's was ? — 

** His overthrow heaped happiness upon him; 
For then, and not till then, he felt himself, 
And found the blessedness of being little, 
And, to add greater honors to his age 
Than man could give him, he died fearing God." 

My brethren, in these thoughts there is a good les- 
son for you, for me, for all of us, if we have the heart 
to learn. It is to count sin as the only evil which can 
be fatal to us ; it is to dread no evil but sin, and when 
we pray for deliverance from evil to pray most of all 
for deliverance from the Evil One, and from the evil 
world, and from our evil selves. When we approach 
any evil which is not sin, in the Hght of God it be- 
comes transfigured. The only evil which is in the 
smallest degree terrible is to have any share in wick- 
edness or in any worldly gift which compromise with 
wickedness might bring to us. 

*' O ye who love the Lord, see that ye hate the 
thing that is evil. The Lord preserveth the souls of 
His saints ; He delivereth them from the hands of the 
ungodly." Deliver us from evil, our Father, by fill- 
ing us with Thy good. 

" Old friends, old scenes will lovelier be 
As more of Heaven in each we see! 
Some softening gleam of love and prayer 
Shall dawn on every cross and care. 



1 86 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

Seek we no more ; content with these, 
Let present rapture, comfort, ease. 
As Heaven shall bid them, come and go. 
The secret this of rest below. 
Only, O Lord, in Thy dear love 
Fit us for perfect rest above. 
And teach us this, and every day. 
To live more nearly as we pray." 



III. 

But deliver us from evil. 

St. Matthew vi. 13. 

IT is natural that there should be much of which 
to speak in this climax of the prayer which the 
Son of God taught us to address to our Father in 
heaven. In my first sermon on this clause I tried to 
impress you with that reality and awfulness of evil 
which nothing short of infatuation leads us to ignore. 
In the second sermon we tried to discover what was 
the root of all evil ; and we found that this root was 
sin. It is sin which, because it violates the true law 
of our beings, transmutes itself into all other evils, 
and lends to them their worst virulence ; whereas 
the elimination of sin from those things which we 
call evil, robs them altogether of their power to de- 
stroy. All other evils 

" May startle well but not astound 
The virtuous mind, that ever walks attended 
By a strong-siding champion, Conscience." 

And one thing which may be said in favor of the 
rendering " Deliver us from the Evil One " is that it 
prevents us from confusing essential evil with its tran- 

187 



1 88 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

sient manifestations, and fixes our minds on the truth 
that the sting of all man's curse is sin. 

But having thus considered the nature of evil, we 
must proceed to the deeply important question, What 
do we mean when we ask to be delivered from it? 
Is it only a helpless cr}- to God for mercy, or does it 
demand anything at our hands also ? 

Have you ever noticed that ''' Deliver us from evil " 
may mean either of two verj' different things? It 
may mean protect us from evil. When the pestilence 
walketh in darkness, let it not come nigh us ; when 
the arrow flieth in the noonday, avert from us its fatal 
and envenomed shaft. Or it may mean, alas! we 
are in the very grip of evil ; the Evil One has us in 
his clutch; the fire is scorching us, snatch us as 
brands out of the burning; our trembling souls are 
in the snare of the fowler, let the snare be broken 
that we may be delivered. We mean, then, either 
let us not fall into this pit of destruction, or pluck ns 
out of it. Keep us from sin, or, since we have sinned, 
let not sin be our final ruin. 

In point of fact the prayer means both. We are 
God's people, and the sheep of His pasture; we are 
sheltered in the fold, or wandering from it ; the gray 
wolf and the leopard and the lion crouch and glare 
all round it. Let them never leap into it ; or, if they 
have seized us, O good Shepherd, smite the wild 
beasts and save us from their fierce teeth and rending 
claws. The prayer means, both protect us and rescue 
us, because we need both ahvavs. It mav be said 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 1 89 

that if our iniquities have already taken such hold 
upon us that we are not able to look up, we are past 
the prayer " Protect us from evil," and only need the 
cry '' Rescue us out of evil." But it is not so. Sin 
is fearfully cumulative ; one sin leads to another ; 
when any one of us has consciously taken sin by the 
hand, we know not into what mire, into what abysses, 
it may drag us. In the lowest deep there may still 
be a lower deep. We still have need to cry. Protect 
us from yet further, from yet worse developments; 
let • not the sinful thought ripen horribly into the 
guilty purpose ; let not 'the guilty purpose break dis- 
astrously into the deadly act. Many a ruined soul, 
suffered to fall into depravity more shameful than he 
had ever deemed possible — suffered to become guilty 
of deeds from which he would once have started with 
indignant horror — has discovered that, to the very 
last, evil men wax worse and worse. Unless God 
protects them from yet more heinous wickedness, 
they know not into what depths of Satan they are 
sure to fall at last. 

But now that we apprehend the twofold signifi- 
cance of this petition, let us notice that, like all the 
other six petitions, it is in both its meanings no otiose 
prayer, no helpless cry, but at the same time a pledge 
from us, a demand upon us. The prayer ** Deliver 
us from evil " is idler than the breath which utters it 
unless it means that we hate the evil ; that we pledge 
ourselves to the utmost to fight against it. If we 
are really asking something from God, we must really 



I90 



THE LORD'S PRAYER. 



give something to God. If we are earnest in the 
prayer, '* Protect us from evil into which we have not 
yet fallen," the prayer becomes an hypocrisy unless 
we prove its sincerity by our watchfulness. If we 
are sincere in the cry, '' Rescue us out of the evil into 
which we have fallen," the prayer is an even deeper 
hypocrisy unless we are ready to prove its sincerity 
by offering to God our determined resolution, our 
constant effort. Let us consider both. 

We pray. Our Father, protect us from the destroyer 
of our souls. And God replies : '' My child, I will 
protect thee ; but, in order that I may do so, thou 
must watch. I cannot protect thee from that which 
thou thyself seekest; from that which, with secret 
treachery, thou desirest. I say to thee, Eat not of the 
forbidden fruit ; but if thou goest to the tree, gazest 
on it, thinkest of it, longest for its fruit, talkest with 
the tempting serpent there, thy prayer is unreal, and 
thou wilt eat of it, and find thyself ashamed and 
naked, and wilt die." 

It is useless merely to pray against temptation, 
unless we watch against it too. Take instances. We 
see on all sides of us many guilty, many ruined men, 
who have been made such by gambling, by impurity, 
by drink. If a young man beginning Hfe would es- 
cape their dreadful fate, may he not well pray to God, 
"Protect me from those curses"? But of what use 
is such a prayer if he dallies with the unclean thing? 
Can he pray not to be defiled, if he takes the pitch in 
his hand ? Can he pray not to be scorched if he treads 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 191 

on the burning coals? Might he not just as well 
assume that a river is not a river, and so walk into it 
and be drowned, as assume that temptation will not 
be temptation to him, and so dabble in it, and tam- 
per with it, and be ruined ? * A clerk sees that a 
fellow- clerk in his office has begun with petty pilfer- 
ings, and gone on to embezzlement and felony and a 
prison cell, by the excitement of betting and greed 
of gain. He would fain be protected from such a 
fate ; but of what use is su,ch a prayer if he interests 
himself in the betting lists and goes to the gambling- 
house, or plays for money ? 

A workingman sees his mates dragged by drink 
into the bottomless pit of humiliation. He sees their 
drunken wives and their ragged, dirty, depraved, 
miserable children ; he sees them sinking into mere 
wrecks of dehumanized humanity, abject slaves of a 
dead thing, human beings no longer with God's image 
upon them, but wretched funnels for drink, doomed 
to end in delirium tremens, and the pauper's grave. 
Of what use is it for him to ask God to protect him 
from this insanity if, instead of saving himself and his 
family by total abstinence, he, too, lounges for hours 
in the public-house, daily exciting his animal passions 
and dulling his moral sensibilities? 

Or suppose that a young man sees his friend bhght- 
ing himself with the sins of his youth which shall lie 
down with him in the grave, poisoning the very foun- 
tains of his blood with the germs of foul disease, sow- 

* Edward Irving. 



192 



THE LORD'S PRAYER. 



ing for the harvest of death the seeds of corruption. 
Ah! well may he pray to be delivered from this 
sorcery of uncleanness, which is the secret curse and 
unutterable shame of so many lives! But of what 
use is it for him so to pray if all the time he is incit- 
ing and inflaming within him by morbid day-dreams, 
by unclean imaginations, by polluted thoughts, by 
corrupt communications, and so at last by lewd and 
lavish acts of sin, the very sparks which, with all his 
might, he ought to trample fiercely beneath his feet? 

Ah! let us never forget: the rule is not only 
'* pray," but it is '' watch and pray " that ye enter 
not into temptation. It is Christ's word, " What I 
say unto you, I say unto all, watch " ; it is St. Peter's 
*' Watch and be sober " ; it is St. Paul's '' Watch thou 
in all things," ''Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, be 
strong." Oh! remember next time you pray this 
prayer, each time you pray this prayer, that if you 
desire that God should protect you from the evil 
which is in the world through sin, you must watch 
against it and suffer in yourself no truce with temp- 
tation, no secret league with death, no unacknowl- 
edged covenant with hell. 

Yet I doubt not that most of those here present 
feel even more the pressing need for the other aspect 
of the prayer, which is — Rescue us out of the evil 
which already has seized upon us with the grasp of a 
vice ; which already, like a serpent, has wound us in 
the folds that threaten utterly to crush us. Yes, and 
this is an even more urgent prayer than the other, 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 193 

because it is far, far easier to keep innocence when it 
has not yet been lost than to recover safety when it 
has been lost. It is far, far easier to keep out of the 
grasp of temptation than, being in it, to shake it off. 
It requires a more stupendous miracle of the grace of 
Christ to burst the fetters of habit, to snap the ada- 
mantine hnk which fetters crime to consequence, to 
cut off the entail of deadly curse. But this form of 
the prayer also is the idlest of all nullities if we do not 
show that we mean it, by resolution and by effort. 

This thought is supremely illustrated by the great 
poet of the Middle Ages. Perhaps his powerful allegory 
may help to impress it more deeply upon you. Dante, 
to cure him of perilous temptations to anger, avarice, 
and lust, has been led by Virgil to see the things that 
are, and to see them as they are, and has therefore 
been round the horrible circles of the damned. He 
has been able to struggle out of this Inferno, and his 
feet are now on the shore of the steep mountain island 
of Purgatory — i.e., of penitence. But first, to cleanse 
him from the clinging mists of the abyss, under the 
sweet hue of eastern sapphire and the serenity of the 
pure air, his guide leads him to a place by the sea, 
which shimmers beneath the dawn, and stooping to 
set his hands on the dew of the wet grass, he tenderly 
washes Dante's defiled and darkened cheeks. Then, 
in place of the vain monastic girdle which Dante has 
flung away, he girds him with a rush, the only plant 
which will grow in the beating surges, but which is no 
sooner plucked than another grows in its stead. You 



194 ^-^^ LORD'S PRAYER. 

see the meaning : when we desire to be rescued from 
sin, which is hell, our souls must first be washed from 
the grime of our pollutions in the dew of God's for- 
giving grace ; and then, since forgiveness for the past 
is one thing, but deliverance from the perils of the 
present and the future another, our loins must be 
girded for strenuous endeavor. But our girdle must 
be the rush of humbleness, which grows again when 
plucked, because the means of grace are never ex- 
hausted. 

Then the poet sees an angel-guided boat steering 
towards the island mount. The souls who are in the 
boat are chanting, " When Israel came out of Egypt." 
When they land, Dante recognizes the soul of the 
sweet poet-musician Casella, and asks him to sing to 
them, and all gather round to listen to his song. But 
instantly the stern guardian of the place rebukes them. 
"What is this," he cries, ''slothful spirits? What 
negligence, what loitering is this? Speed ye to the 
mountain to strip you of the slough which allows not 
God to be manifest to you." There the keynote is 
struck : no repentance without effort ; nothing must 
interfere with that repentance, which, to the sinful, 
has become the very work of life. 

What he who would be rescued from evil must say 
is — This one thing I do. When — whether from new 
passion for the good, or new pain at the evil — the 
soul collects itself for a supreme effort, it must attend 
to nothing else. For the mountain of penitence is 
steep. The entrance to it, indeed, by a good resolu- 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 1 95 

tion, is SO easy that it is like a mere gap in the hedge 
filled up by a forkful of thorns; but, once entered, 
the soul must climb, and climb, and climb, however 
weary, with only this consolation, that the more reso- 
lutely we climb the more easy will the cHmb become. 
I received the other day an anonymous card 
on which was written the single sentence, '' I am 
weary of repenting." Alas ! repentance that becomes 
weary is scarce repentance; it may only become a 
repentance that needs repenting of. But to the soul 
that perseveres there are on the road sweet resting- 
places of hope, wherein it seems carried up as on the 
wings of eagles ; and the more one mounts the less it 
pains ; and so, the first thought followed by a resolve, 
the first divine resolve followed by an action, leads to 
the portal of conscious deliverance. It is so narrow 
that to Dante it looks but Hke a crack in the solid 
wall of rock. It is approached by three steps, the 
first of white marble, so smoothed and polished that 
it mirrors the whole man ; the second of inky purple, 
rugged and fire-burnt, and cracked lengthwise and 
across ; the third of porphyry, red as the blood v/hich 
spurts from an artery. Above these three steps is a 
threshold, as of diamond, on which, in ashen-colored 
robes, with keys of gold and silver in one hand, and 
in the other a dazzling sword, an angel sits in silence. 
Prostrate at his holy feet, Dante asks for mercy ; and 
while he smites upon his breast, the angel with his 
sword-point marks the letter P — for Peccattnn, Sin — 
seven times upon his forehead, and bids him wash 



196 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

off those fatal letters as he toils up the steep terraces 
within. Then, unlocking the door on its strident 
hinges, he says, '* Enter; but notice well — he who 
looks back must return." 

Ah! my friends, if you see the meaning of this 
profound allegory, you see what this prayer '' Deliver 
us from the Evil One " requires of us. The steep, 
steep chmb is the toilsome struggle against our sins, 
habits, and treacheries, which must follow the resolve 
to be made free. The crack in the rocky wall is the 
strait gate ; the white step, in which we shine re- 
flected, is the step of absolute sincerity. The dark 
purple step, Vvdth the cracks on it which make a cross, 
is deep contrition, " breaking the hard heart of the 
gazer on the Cross " ; the scarlet step is the step of 
love all aflame, *' offering in self-dedication the life- 
blood of body, soul, and spirit." The adamantine 
threshold, the rock of diamond, which masses itself 
over them, is the merit of Christ's atonement. The 
angel who sits thereon is the Angel of Penitence 
and Forgiveness ; the sword he bears is the sword 
of penance and penalty for our past transgressions ; 
the seven P's which he marks on our foreheads are 
the Peccata, the Seven Deadly Sins, of every one of 
which, in greater or less degree — if not in deed, then 
in word ; if not in word, then in thought — we have 
been guilty — pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, excess, 
and lust. Each of these sins is punished on one of 
the terraces of Purgatory, till, by hatred of the evil, 
and love of the opposite good, the angel can brush, 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 197 

ofie after another, each of the fatal brands from the 
sinner's forehead with his soft and starry plumes. 
And the soul that is in earnest, the soul which is 
aroused sufficiently not to grow weary in the effort 
after salvation, does not shrink from the toil, does 
not murmur at the penalties. For 

" Hearts that verily repent 
Are burdened with impunity, 

And comforted by chastisement : 
That punishment's the best to bear 

Which follows soonest on the sin, 
And guilt's a game where losers fare 

Better than those who seem to win." 

The true penitent climbs up the steps of sincerity, 
contrition, love, to Christ's pardoning grace, and then 
is purged one by one of all his stains. On the top- 
most terrace sensual sinners have to be purified in 
burning flame; yet they are " contented in the fire," 
because it is purging away the vileness of their 
shame. 

Dante, too, has to pass through that healing flame. 
The angel bids him, and he stretches forth his clasped 
hands, and remembers the hideous sight which he 
has seen of men being burned to death, and stands 
still in fear, against his better conscience. Yea, for 
it is not easy for a man to face a wasted past and a 
scorching future. It is not easy for him 

" To pick the vicious quitch 
Of blood and custom wholly out of him, 
And make all clean, and plant himself afresh." 



198 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

It can only be done by agonies and energies, and the 
effort can only be sustained by the invincible sweet- 
ness of what lies beyond. Then he enters the flame, 
but ''When I was within," he says, ''I would have 
flung myself into molten glass to cool me, so immeas- 
urable was the burning there." Yes! have you 
ever in your life been forced to be utterly ashamed 
of yourself ; to think what a vile, corrupt, shameful, 
shameless sinner you have been? If so, you know 
at least something of that awful blush of shame which 
adds heat to the seven-times-heated furnace, but 
which all must undergo who so have sinned. Not 
until they have repented in shame, as in burning fire, 
will they hear the angel-voices chanting, '* Come, ye 
blessed of my Father." Nor will they know what 
that meaneth, *' Blessed are the pure in heart, for they 
shall see God." 

My friends, I have borrowed the aid of the power- 
ful immortal allegory to bring home to you the truth 
that if for protection from evil you need watchfulness, 
so for rescue out of the power of evil you need resolve 
and effort. And this is what Christ and all His 
apostles teach. '' Strive," says our blessed Lord, — 
literally, agonize — " to enter in at the strait gate." 
''Fight the good fight," says St. Paul, "lay hold of 
eternal life." To labor fervently, to deny ourselves, 
to take up our cross daily and follow Christ, to mor- 
tify our members which are upon the earth, to crucify 
the flesh, to bring our bodies into subjection, to cut 
off the right hand, and pluck out the right eye ; this. 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 199 

and nothing short of this, is required of us if we 
would be deHvered out of the evil to which we have 
disastrously given a part in our souls ; and, if we be 
sincere in our desires, this, and nothing less than this, 
the grace of God will enable us to accomplish. 

Oh ! let us then remember what we have learned so 
far. Evil, the deadliest and worst of all possible evil 
for human souls, is ever around us and within us ; if 
God be with us its human semblance may touch us, 
but we shall be utterly unscathed by its essential 
curse. We pray to be delivered from it, and we can 
offer no prayer which is so awfully necessary for every 
one of us. But if we mean '' Protect us from it," we 
must not only pray, but watch; and if we mean 
'' Rescue us out of it," we must toil, and cHfnb, and 
agonize, and fight, and endure even unto the end. 
But he that endureth unto the end, the same shall 
be saved. 



IV. 

But deliver us from evil. 

St. Matthew vi. 13. 

WE have now considered in three sermons this 
prayer, in which Hes so much of the meaning of 
human life. We first tried to reaHze that the deadly 
phenomenon of evil in the world is not one with 
which we are unconcerned, but that the happiness of 
the present and the destinies of the future depend 
upon the relation in which we stand to evil — whether 
of intense antagonism, to our soul's health, or of 
compliance and participation, to our utter destruction. 
We then tried to understand what Christ meant by 
evil, and we saw that He meant, mainly and prima- 
rily, all sin and wickedness, and our ghostly enemy, 
and everlasting death, as being the source and the issue 
of all other evils, and that which alone gives them 
their deadly sting. In the last chapter we tried to 
grasp the truth that the deliverance for which we pray 
is only to be gained by prayer accompanied by watch- 
fulness, prayer which is at once the inspiration and 
the outcome of resolution and effort. It remains 
now to consider by what means, if our prayer be 
sincere, God can and will deliver us from evils and 



202 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

from evil : alike from physical calamities and mental 
misery, and, above all, from that disseverance from 
His presence and transgression of His law, from 
which all other evils ultimately spring. 

Deliver 21s from evil. First, in its lower sense, 
from the evils of this life, from the evils of penalty 
and consequence, from outward mischief, from human 
vulgarism, stupidity, and malevolence, from trouble, 
sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity. De- 
liver us from these in both senses. Protect us from 
them, so that '' the enemy shall not be able to do us 
violence." Rescue us out of them. ''Take us out 
of the mire, that we sink not ; let not the waterflood 
drown us, neither let the deep swallow us up." 

As for protection from these miseries of this sinful 
world, it can, at the best, only be relative. It is not 
God's will — as things are, it would not be good for 
us — that the world should be our rest or our home. 
''Although affliction cometh not forth of the dust, 
neither doth trouble spring out of the ground," says 
Eliphaz the Temanite, " yet man is born to trouble 
as the sparks fly upward." We do not need testi- 
mony, we only need experience, to teach every one 
of us that sorrow and sighing must befall us. " In 
the world," said our Lord and Master, " ye shall have 
tribulation." We whose sun is already sinking to- 
wards the west; oh! how many trials have we not 
experienced, and we know not how many others may 
be in store for us. Surely it is in mercy that God 
hides the future in His gracious impenetrable dark- 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 203 

ness. If from the days of happy boyhood men could 
look forward to all that awaits them — the disillusion- 
ment, the struggle, the failure, the bereavements, the 
losses, the throbbing nerves, the often aching heart — 
how would they be able to endure? The poet takes 
the little children on his knee, and says to them: 

" O little feet! that such long years 
Must wander on thro' hopes and fears, 

Must ache and bleed beneath your load, 
I, nearer to the wayside inn, 
Where toil shall cease and rest begin, 
Am weary, thinking of your road!" 

'' It is now sixteen or seventeen years," says 
Edmund Burke in a celebrated passage, '* since I saw 
the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Ver- 
sailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which 
she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. 
I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and 
cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move 
in, glittering Hke the morning star, full of life and 
splendor and joy. Little did I dream when she added 
titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, 
respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to 
carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed 
in that bosom." And Burke wrote before the crown- 
ing agonies, hardly to be described, which burst over 
that fair Queen ; before the days when, husbandless, 
and worse than childless, she left her prison to lay 
upon the block her gray discrowned head. 

''To-day," wrote the gallant Sir W. Napier, ''is 



204 ' ^^-^ LORD'S PRAYER. 

the anniversary of the battle of NIvelle, in which I 
won my Heutenant-colonelcy. I was then strong and 
swift of foot. Only one man got into the rocks of 
La Rhune before me, and he was but a step, yet eight 
hundred veterans, strong as lions, were striving madly 
to be first. I am now old, feeble, bent, miserable, and 
my eyes are dim, very dim, with weeping for my lost 
child, and my brain is feeble also. I cannot read 
with pleasure, still less can I think or judge." Alas! 
it is not only for the great that life has such calamities 
in store. They happen to the humblest and the most 
obscure ; they happen (though look how differently ! ) 
to the wise and to the foolish, to the good and to the 
bad. To the brightest boy or girl we know remains 
the certainty that the days will come and the years 
draw nigh in which they too must say, *' We have 
no pleasure in them." 

If, then, God does not altogether protect us from 
these evils, can He, will He, has He any means to 
deliver us out of them? Yes! He has the perfect 
means. '' The Lord knoweth how to deHver the godly 
out of temptations. He maketh sore, and bindeth 
up; He woundeth, and His hands make whole-; He 
shall deliver thee in six troubles ; yea, in seven shall 
no evil hurt thee ; in famine He shall redeem thee 
from death, in war from the power of the sword; 
thou shalt be hid from the scourge of the tongue, 
neither shalt thou be afraid of destruction when it 
Cometh." The troubled psalmist found, and thou- 
sands of God's saints have experienced after him, that 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 205 

" He healeth them that are broken in heart, and giv- 
eth medicine to heal their sickness " ; that " many 
are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord de- 
Hvereth him out of all." 

He delivereth him; but how? I cannot answer 
better than good Bishop Andrewes does, that God 
delivers us in four ways. God delivers us, first, when 
He doth quickly take the evil from us, and not suffer 
it to continue to our utter overthrow. When '' His 
wrath endureth but the twinkling of an eye, and in 
His pleasure is life ; heaviness may endure for a night, 
but joy Cometh in the morning." 

Secondly, He delivers us when He mingles some 
comfort with our affliction, that He may make us bear 
it the better. Sudden calamity came on Joseph in 
Egypt. He was hurled from his prosperity into a 
dungeon ; calumny, like the poison of asps, blighted 
his innocent name. Yet, even in prison, God sent 
him sweet alleviations ; and so made him forget all 
his labor and travail that he called his first-born son 
*' Manasseh," or '' Forgetting." And so, too, David 
says : " In the multitude of the sorrows that I had 
in my heart, Thy comforts have refreshed my soul." 
And so, too, the poor, sick, hated, persecuted St. Paul 
wrote : *' Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and God of all 
comfort, who comforteth us in all our affliction." 

Thirdly, God deHvers us out of evils by giving us 
patience to bear them. We think little of this virtue 
of patience, resignation, submission; but it is very 



206 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

dear to God, because it cannot exist without faith and 
hope, and because it is closely akin to humbleness 
and charity. Any calamity is more than compen- 
sated to us if it teaches us, by patience in the day of 
adversity, to acquire possession of our souls. 

Fourthly, God delivers us out of these evils by 
turning them into greater good. He chastens us in 
the world that we may not be condemned ivith the 
world. He turns the tears of sorrow into the pearls 
of a brighter crown. By weaning us from the transi- 
tory, He leads us to the eternal. By emptying us of 
the world. He fills us with Himself. He makes the 
via crucis the via hicis. He causes us, in the very 
fire, to thank Him that our light affliction, which is 
but for a moment, is working for us a far more ex- 
ceeding and eternal weight of glory. 

He whom in these four ways — by removal, by 
comfort, by patience, by divine compensation — God 
thus delivers out of calamities need not fear; — 

" He shall not dread misfortune's angry mien, 
Nor idly sink beneath her onset rude." 

Much more, then, should he proceed to offer with all 
his heart the prayer in its other sense : " Deliver us 
not only from evils, but from the evil of all evils ; 
from sin ; from the Evil One. Deliver us, for Thou 
art our Father. Deliver us from the Evil One, for 
he is not only our enemy, but Thine." 

Now, here the sad thing is, that so many who offer 
this prayer do not really believe in it. Either they 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 207 

do not wish that it should be granted, like that poor 
African youth who prayed to God against his impure 
passions, with the secret hope that God would not 
yet hear him, that he might indulge in them a little 
longer ; or they do not believe that it can be granted, 
like that unhappy poet, who, choosing to assume 
that he was reprobate, set himself to secure his own 
damnation, and work all uncleanness with greediness. 
The two things which prevent sinners from really 
crying to be delivered from the Evil One are the 
secret treachery which would fain keep both its sin 
and its Saviour; or the despairing apathy which 
drives men into the wretchedness of unclean living. 
Of that secret treachery, which does not even really 
wish to be delivered, I shall say nothing. God alone 
can deal with it. 

But of that other hindrance — men's despair, men's 
disbelief that they can ever be purified, that God can 
ever bring a clean thing out of a thing so unclean as 
they — of that doubt I must speak ; for I feel sure it 
lurks in myriads of hearts. 

Is it not the old doubt of Nicodemus, when Christ 
said unto him, '' Verily, I say unto you, ye must be 
born again " ? " How can a man be born again when, 
he is old?" querulously asked the Rabbi; ''can he 
enter a second time into his mother's womb, and be 
born?" To whom the Saviour replied, "Verily, I 
say unto you, unless a man be born again of water 
and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom 
of God." He does not say that this spiritual regeii- 



208 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

eration is not a miracle; only that it is a miracle 
which must be wrought, and without which no soul 
among us shall see salvation ; seeing that flesh and 
blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, neither 
doth corruption inherit incorruption. 

And if you say that, whether this miracle must be 
wrought or no, you do not believe that it ever can or 
will be wrought on you^ I answer, **' Man, what is this, 
and why art thou despairing ? God shall forgive thee 
all but thy despair." You shall have evidence, clear 
and unmistakable, that it has been wrought, and that 
in many cases ; and that in age after age, and again 
and again, on multitudes fully as evil as you have 
been. Why not on you? 

You say (who has not heard it said? is it not true 
that many sinners among you have said it to them- 
selves?), I believe that some are innocent, that there 
are some of whom tfie grace of God has taken early 
hold, so that they have kept innocency and done the 
thing that is right, and are at peace ; but I — can the 
Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? 
I, who from my earliest years have been perverted 
and corrupted by assent to sin ; I, who long ago wil- 
fully took sin by the hand; I, all the thoughts of 
whose heart are only evil continually ; I, so tied and 
bound with the chain of my sins ; I, who am so 
stricken with this leprosy — no, I do not believe that 
I can ever be delivered now. It is too late. I am a 
prisoner, fast bound in misery and iron. You might 
as well bid the worm throw off the rock that is crush- 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 209 . 

ing him, and soar like the eagle, as bid me dream of 
deliverance or of freedom from this strangling load of 
sin. I know how it will be. I shall go on sinning 
and hating myself, and vainly pretending to repent, 
and sinning again ; and the sin may give me up, but 
I can never give up the sin, until, at last, the pit shall 
shut up her mouth upon me. 

To whom the answer is, O friend, O brother, O 
sinful soul, thou art thinking of thyself, and not of 
Christ ; thou art looking to the place where the fiery 
serpent has bitten thee, and brooding over the venom 
in thy veins ; not raising thine eyes to Him who was 
Hfted up for thy healing, as Moses lifted up the brazen 
serpent in the wilderness. All that thou sayest of 
thyself is true. Thou are abject ; thou art impotent ; 
thou art diseased ; thy evil habits and thy evil nature 
may well seem to thee as locks and keys upon the 
gate of hell. Of thyself thou canst do nothing. But 
thou art not asked to do it of thyself ; and thou canst 
do all things through Him that strengtheneth thee. 
He can uplift ; He can heal ; He can inspire ; He 
can even purify the unclean. It is to the helpless 
who feel themselves helpless, if with all their hearts 
they truly seek Him, that He will most surely come. 
He 

" Can roll this strangling load oflf thee, 
Break off thy yoke, and set thee free." 

For so it has been with many as bad and as impo- 
tent as thou. Hear the memorable confession of 
the martyr St. Cyprian. He had been a pagan, rich, 



2IO THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

worldly, eloquent, entangled in pagan sins. He grew 
disgusted and horrified at the world's misery and 
wickedness. Nevertheless, being an alien from truth 
and light, he thought it impossible to be born again ; 
or, while still bound to the body, to be changed in 
heart and soul. How, he asked, is such conversion 
possible ? How can the impulses of natural temper- 
ament and the indurations of engrained habit be laid 
aside? How can avarice, luxury, ostentation, ambi- 
tion, be exchanged for self-denial and humble simplic- 
ity ? Will not the drunkenness, the pride, the passion, 
the lust in which I have been entangled retain their 
seductiveness? Not so. St. Cyprian sought God, 
and found Him. He received that moral resurrection. 
The vice-corrupted heathen became, late in life, the 
godly Christian, and after many years of holy and 
pure living, he died a martyr of his Lord. 

Take, again, the yet more remarkable conversion 
of St. Augustine. His Confessions tell us that, from 
boyhood upward to mature manhood, he had been 
base, deceptive, and, above all, so deeply stained and 
corrupted with all sorts of impurity, that it seemed to 
him utterly impossible that he should ever live a 
chaste life. Yet God found him. God spoke to him 
at last in the text, '' Not in rioting and drunkenness, 
not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and 
envying; but put ye^on the Lord Jesus Christ, and 
make no provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts 
thereof." Augustine was converted; he was born 
again. The miracle of God's grace restored to him 



BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL. 211 

the clean heart and the right spirit within him ; and 
thenceforth his Hfe was that of a chaste and holy 
saint. 

But why do I touch on individual instances ? Was 
it not thus with the whole Christian world when the 
call of Christ came to them? Might they not have 
said, when they were called to be saints, How vain 
the call to us? We are steeped to the lips in the 
abominations of a pagan society. We are in a world 
wherein common goodness is hardly to be found; 
wherein the deadliest corruptions pass for venial pec- 
cadilloes ; wherein holiness — even as an aspiration, 
even as an ideal — is not only unknown, but undreamed 
of. Nay, more than this. We have ourselves been 
fornicators, adulterers, eflfeminate, thieves, covetous, 
drunkards, extortioners, and worse, if worse be possi- 
ble. Yet look at the mighty change! "And such 
w^ere some of you," writes St. Paul to them. '' These 
things, these abject victims of lust and greed, were 
some of you ; but 3^e are washed ; but ye are sancti- 
fied; but ye are justified in the name of the Lord 
Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God." 

If God's miracle could thus regenerate a world, is 
it beyond His power to give you the new birth, if 
you truly seek Him? My friends, have you been so 
unhappy as never to meet with instances of the drunk- 
ard who has been reclaimed ? of the polluted who has 
become clean ? of the selfish whose cold, hard heart 
has been filled with love ? There have been myriads 
such. And since there is hope while there is life. 



212 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

there is not one of you — no thief, no harlot, no drunk- 
ard, no unclean or profane person — who may not, 
in answer to his prayer for cleansing, hear Christ's 
echo, ''I will; be cleansed!" If you will pray with 
all your heart " Deliver us from evil " ; if with your 
prayer you will watch and resolve and struggle, yours 
also shall be the blessedness of him whose iniquity is 
forgiven, whose sin is covered ; to you also will God 
give the comfort of His grace again, and restore you 
with His free Spirit. 



FOR THINE IS THE KINGDOM. 



2>3 



For thine is the kingdom. 

St. Matthew vi. 14. 

THESE words are taken from what is called the 
doxology to the Lord's Prayer. If you turn to 
your Revised Version you will not find them. In 
the record of that prayer, as given by St. Luke, they 
are omitted altogether by all the best manuscripts. 
In the record by St. Matthew, you will find them 
given only in the margin, as occurring in some ancient 
manuscripts, although with variations. And for this 
reason, in our public worship, they are sometimes 
appended, and sometimes omitted by our Church. 

They cannot therefore be certainly regarded as 
having formed a part of the Lord's Prayer as it was 
first taught by Christ to His disciples. Yet even if 
they did not, they are so absolutely Scriptural, so 
divinely appropriate, so entirely accordant with all 
the models of the prayer offered to His heavenly 
Father by our Lord Himself, that we rightly use them 
as a liturgical addition, which, in all probability, de- 
rived its sanction from the teaching of the Spirit of 
God, as far back as the age of the apostles. 

They are fitting as a due expression of praise after 
the seven petitions which we have offered. In them 
the prayer returns full circle. We have prayed that 

215 



2l6 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

our Father's name may be hallowed, and we here 
confess with adoration that His is the glory. We 
have prayed that His kingdom may come, and we 
confess that His is the kingdom. We have prayed 
that His will may be done in earth as in heaven, and 
we acknowledge that His is the power. We have 
brought to Him our needs, our guilt, our peril ; we 
acknowledge that He alone can supply, can deliver, 
can forgive. 

I know not how it may be with others, but I con- 
fess, that to me, as life goes on, as I experience more 
and more how illusive is all that the world promises, 
and how empty is all that it bestows — I confess, I 
say, that I find even deeper comfort in these eternal 
verities which tower like mountain-peaks into the blue 
air of heaven. From squabbles over the infinitely 
little, we mount to a serener air when we fix our 
thoughts only on the love of God, the tenderness of 
Christ, the silver wings and the refreshing dew of the 
grace of the Comforter. The questions which whistle 
like empty winds and roar like brawling streams 
through the narrow banks of contemporary religion 
and contemporary politics, sink into a distant murmur 
when we take our stand by these eternal seas. 

There is no truth more constantly reiterated, more 
emphatically insisted on throughout Scripture, than 
this — that " the Lord is King, be the people never so 
impatient ; He sitteth between the Cherubim, be the 
earth never so unquiet." 

What would men's lives be if they really felt and 



FOR THINE IS THE KINGDOM. 21 7 

grasped the stupendous truth that there is a God ; 
and that we shall all stand at His judgment-seat? 
Nearly three hundred years ago, in this church,* be- 
fore the assembled House of Commons, at the open- 
ing of the session of 1621, Bishop Lancelot Andrewes 
preached a sermon on the text *'God standeth in the 
congregation of princes; He will judge among the 
gods." He told the members of Parliament — who in 
those days, now gone forever, came in hundreds to 
this their own church — that God was standing, and 
that God would judge, among them ; that if they 
w^ould regard His standing, they would never need to 
fear His judging; and that, so to regard it, they had 
need of these four things — 

1. Set down this and beHeve it, that He is pres- 
ent; 

2. So behave yourselves as if you did believe it; 

3. Show yourselves well affected to His presence ; 

4. Do those things which may make Him rejoice 
to be among you. 

I repeat his words. I say that, be he legislator or 
be he private citizen, he who is able to grasp those 
two sentences, '' Deits stat, Dens judicabit," would 
scarce need any other restraint from ** prejudices, 
private interests, and partial affections," or any other 
impulse to all that is noblest, most inspiring, most 
regenerative in human life. 

We none of us deny God's presence; but which 

* The last few sermons of the course were preached in St. Marga- 
ret's, Westminster. 



2l8 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

of US believes it in the only true sense of the word 
" believe " ? Men in all ages have tried all sorts of 
subterfuges to get rid of it. Behind the supreme 
God they have put some dark shapeless thing which 
they called Destiny, and have thought that it was 
this immense solitary spectre which was the real Lord 
of all. No more blighting error could exist. You 
see the curse of it in Mahometan fatalism, which 
withers like an atrophy every nerve of life, and tends 
to drown men in the bottomless pit of sensuous apa- 
thy. To those who seek Him God makes Himself 
known; to those who thus deny Him He falls silent. 

And some are so absurd as to think that Chance 
made all things — '' Chance," a word so senselessly 
irreligious that it does not once occur on the page of 
Holy Writ. How can any reasonable being fall into 
such stultification of the intellect, such ignoring of 
the conscience? Chance is the antithesis of order, 
and the universe is full of order. Chance is the an- 
tithesis of law, and all the material forces, even when 
complex, work with mathematical exactness. Chance 
is the antithesis of harmony and adaptation, and the 
world is full of harmonies and adaptations, number- 
less and exquisite. 

We have but thoughtfully to consider the unintel- 
ligent creation to find in it an intelligent, a personal, 
an eternal, omnipotent spiritual power. Nature alone 
leads us at once to Nature's God. 

But a king is no king of ours unless we be his sub- 
jects ; and some men seem to adopt the old Epicurean 



FOR THINE IS THE KINGDOAL 219 

belief which admitted God, but denied Providence ; 
which beheved in the Personal Supreme, but thought 
that men were accidents of accidents for which He 
cared not. They thought this because they would 
not face the problem of evil, and so they held that the 
gods, absorbed in their own selfish enjoyment, were 
utterly indifferent to the agonies of men. But, though 
something is wrong which we cannot explain, we see 
even in Nature that the Eternal Power, which is ever 
transmuting evil into good or educing good out of evil, 
desires and loves the happiness of His creatures. First, 
then, we find God ; next we find that He is omnipo- 
tent ; then that He is good. We learn that God is ; 
and then that God is love. Further, which infinitely 
concerns us, He teaches us that He is righteous. If 
by our Reason we find the being of God, from our 
Conscience we learn the duty of man ! If in Nature 
we see the relations of God to man, in Duty we see 
the obHgations of man to God. All human history, all 
human experience, teach us that the infinite reaHties 
of life He not in rank and power, not in pleasure or 
wealth, not in the gratification of earthly desires, not 
in the petty differences of religious opinion or religious 
practices, but in the distinctions between justice and 
injustice, truth and falsehood, selfishness and gen- 
erosity, courage and cowardice, Hcentiousness and 
chastity. Even the agnostic can see that we are but 
passing in brief and swift procession between two 
eternities ; and that our lot will be decided therein 
and thereafter according as we do good or do evil. 



220 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

And when we say, '' For Thine is the kingdom," we 
acknowledge this. We mean, if we mean anything, 
that in the long run righteousness will justify itself; 
that goodness only is divine and eternal ; that '' in- 
justice and wickedness may be long-Hved, but Dooms- 
day comes to them at last." 

All truths that are true should be capable of verifi- 
cation, and these truths are so. The assertion, '* Thine 
is the kingdom," is not only a conclusion of the reason, 
it is the sole explanation of the life of man. Men who 
have tried to get rid of it have only proved it with 
more overwhelming force, as if one should fling up a 
stone to disprove the law of gravitation, and it fell 
back and crushed him. Over and over again, colossal 
human tyrannies have been dashed to pieces by the 
stone cut without hands, and have proved that no 
kingdom which is not based on God's rightebusness 
can ever stand. Egypt threatened to exterminate 
the people of God, and lo ! 

' ' The Red Sea waves o'erthrew 
Busiris and his Memphian chivalry." 

Assyria terrified the nations with a tyranny the most 
colossal and the most horrifying which the world has 
ever seen, and the humble prophet of Israel, strong 
in God's protection, in the very zenith of Assyria's 
pride, exclaimed : " The virgin, the daughter of Sion, 
hath despised thee ; the daughter of Jerusalem hath 
shaken her head at thee." Babylon mightily oppressed 
the nations, and Babylon is a mound of debris in the 



FOR THINE IS THE KINGDOM. 221 

desert where the shepherd shuns to pitch his tent. 
Greece seduced and bewitched the world with the 
enchantment of her fascination, and Greece perished 
in the enervation and decrepitude of her own vices. 
Rome stamped upon her subject dependencies her 
iron impress, and Rome, in her turn, infected by the 
corruption she had learned, wandered through the 
world vainly seeking for air unpoisoned by herself. 

Shall we take the last of these vast attempts to 
succeed without a conscience, and to substitute man's 
despotism for God's kingdom? Intoxicated with em- 
pire, flushed with uncounted victories, the first Napo- 
leon cynically proclaimed to a trembhng Europe : *' I 
have observed that God is always on the side of the 
strongest battalions." Was He so? Napoleon scat- 
tered kingdoms among his brothers and his generals, 
and but for England might have made French satra- 
pies of all the Contixient. Amid bursts of cheering his 
Grand Army crossed the Niemen ; he won the awful 
battle of Borodino ; he took Smolensko ; he dictated a 
despatch from the Kremlin at Moscow. Then the 
soft snows of God — no more — began to fall ; and, 
annihilated by the most insignificant of the powers of 
heaven, his Grande Armce was tossed out of Russia 
by the spear-points of the Cossacks, and the despot 
of the world was flung aside, at last, to die on a mis- 
erable islet amid disputes with a poor English soldier 
about etiquette and champagne. 

Nor has it been otherwise with Churches when they 
tried to thrust themselves into the place of God. 



222 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

How did it fare with the enormous pretensions of 
the once irresistible Papacy ? No Pope had ever boast- 
fully uttered such great swelling words of vanity as 
the guilty Boniface VIII. in 1300, in his Bull, Unain 
Sanctam, in which he declared that the whole human 
race was subject to the Pope of Rome; yet three 
years later, he, at Anagni, received from William de 
Nogaret, the descendant of a martyr whose blood had 
been shed by priestly tyrants, that blow on the cheek 
which showed that his power was gone. No one had 
more shamelessly exercised a sensual infallibility than 
Leo X., and he had on his side the mightiest of Hv- 
ing potentates, Charles V. Against them the simple 
monk, Martin Luther, stood alone before the assem- 
bled cardinals and kings, with the simple words, 
''Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me!" 

And which w^on? The Papacy w^as smitten with 
impotence, and Charles V. retired to over- eat and 
over-scourge himself at San Yuste in miserable en- 
nui. The Church of England, thank God, became 
a Reformed Church, never to be otherwise unless she 
apostatize from every noble principle of intellectual 
freedom and national greatness. Then Philip H., 
with infinite prayers to saints — prayers vainer than 
the breath that uttered them — sent his Invincible 
Armada, laden with the spoils of Mexico and the 
thumbscrews of the Inquisition, to burn and torture 
England back into the doting and anti- Christian su- 
perstitions which he called the Catholic faith. What 
came of his Invincible Armada? Answer, ye free 



FOR THINE IS THE KINGDOM. 22 1 

winds of England, when God cfflavit vento ct dissipavit 
cos ! Answer, ye white cliffs and rocky promontories, 
strewn with shattered and unwieldly wrecks ! Answer, 
spirits of our fathers, from every wave ! The thunder 
of England's caravels hurled back their defiance to 
the intriguing Jesuits and their decrepit debauchee. 
England, so long as she is England, shall know no 
king save Jesus Christ, and no priest, impotently 
usurping the sole priesthood, of her Lord, shall tyran- 
nize in her dominions. If ever she should sink again, 
through the supineness and effeminacy of her children, 
into a miserable decrepit priest-ridden England — a 
pale reflex and feeble echo of mediaeval superstitions 
— if she should not stand fast in the liberty where- 
with Christ has made her free, but voluntarily entangle 
herself again in the yoke of bondage — though she 
have been the first among the nations, her last end 
shall be that she too shall perish forever. 

Thine is tJie kingdom. With what deeper awe, with 
what more abounding comfort, with what grander 
inspirations, can we, as citizens, enter on the duties 
which from time to time claim all our energy than 
with those inspired by the sense of this mighty truth ? 
And it is everywhere around you if you will notice 
it. It is written on the heavens above and on the 
earth beneath ; now in autographs of love and beauty, 
and now in blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke. Will 
you not see God because He is so near you ? Will 
you not recognize His kingdom because of its famil- 
iarity ? 



224 ^'-^^ LORD'S PRAYER. 

" ' Oh! where is the sea ? ' the fishes cried, 
As they swam the crystal waters through ; 
* We've heard from of old, of the ocean's tide. 

And we long to look on the waters blue. 
The wise ones tell of an infinite sea : 

Oh! who can tell us if such there be? ' " 



Shall we men be like those ignorant fishes? We 
are members of God's kingdom : in it we live, and 
move, and have our being; it lies around us in the 
atmosphere we breathe. Shall we ignore it? Shall 
we hve as though it were not? Shall we violate its 
conditions, defy its laws ? Our citizenship is in heaven ; 
shall we act as though earth were our sole habitation, 
and this life and its gauds and degradations our be- 
all and end-all? Ah! if we acknowledge the truth 
of Christ's kingdom on our lips, let us acknowledge 
it in our lives. If God's is the kingdom, what is our 
duty to Him as His common subjects but to promote 
His will among our fellow-men? Can we not make 
it our aim to weigh every measure that comes before 
us in the balances of the sanctuary — never to let the 
interests of right be left undefended for fear either of 
the sneers of cynicism or the forces of greed? Can 
we not promote, with all our might, every measure 
which makes for righteousness? Can we not throw 
an aegis of inviolable protection over the miserable 
and the oppressed? Is it not our duty to sweep 
away the feverous slums and rotting tenements which 
rob mankind of pure air and pure water and blight 
them from generation to generation into squalor and 



FOR THINE IS THE KINGDOM. 225 

disease; to see that the children of the nation are 
brought up, not only in rudiments of superficial knowl- 
edge, but in sound learning and religious instruction ; 
above all, to smite, with no timid hand, the hoary- 
head of every inveterate abuse, and strip ruthlessly 
of their ill-gotten gains all those who live by pander- 
ing to the vices and promoting the ruin of their breth- 
ren? And if we are not legislators, still the legisla- 
tors must obey the voice of the nation, and the duty 
ever rests on us to help to frame that public opinion 
which sways the Senate, and shakes the throne, and 
" precedes the chariot of Almighty God," and is heard 
before the Judgment Seat. 

Thine is the kingdom. 

When, three centuries ago, in 1557, the Spaniards, 
under Philip II., were besieging CoHgny In the little 
town of St. Quentin, they shot over the city walls a 
shower of arrows to which were attached little strips 
of parchment with promises meant to seduce from 
their allegiance the starving and fever-stricken inhab- 
itants. Coligny thought it sufficient to take a piece 
of parchment, to write on it the two words, Regem 
habemus, to tie it on a javelin, and hurl it into the 
Spanish camp. The king of Coligny was the wretched 
Henry 11. of France. Have we then no king? Is 
not Christ our King — the King of verity and judg- 
ment, the King of mercy and tenderness, the King 
who loved us and died for us, the King who sits at 
the right hand of the Majesty on high? We can roll 
forth in thunders of music : 



226 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

" Crown Him with many crowns, 
The King upon His throne ; 
Hark, how the heavenly anthem drowns 
All music but its own!" 

But oh! that we, too, would seize our lives as a 
javelin, and, writing on them the two words Regem 
habemus, would hurl it with all our force into the 
serried ranks of the enemies of God. This, however, 
is certain : Christ's is the kingdom, and they only can 
inherit it, and they only, whether as men or as nations, 
can share its blessings, who love, who acknowledge, 
who obey, who Hve in faithful allegiance to Jesus 
Christ, who is its King. 



THE POWER AND THE GLORY. 



227 



The power and the glory. 

St. Matthew vi. 13. 

ALTHOUGH this doxology to the Lord's Prayer 
may only have been an early and liturgical 
addition, I trust that none of us will regard it as un- 
necessary or meaningless. In it, as I have said, the 
Prayer returns full circle. We began with God ; we 
end with God. Christ teaches us, in approaching 
God, not to come merely as needy, tempted, guilty 
creatures. Such indeed we are. As needy, we re- 
quire to pray. Give tis our daily bread ; as guilty, 
Forgive us our trespasses ; as tempted and imperilled, 
Deliver us from evil. But we do not offer these 
petitions of our human impotence and wretchedness 
until, losing ourselves in God's infinitude as a drop is 
lost in the ocean, we have first offered the universal 
prayers which entreat the hallowing of God's name, 
the furtherance of His kingdom, the fulfilment of 
His will. And when we have added to these the cry 
of our necessities, we return once more in this doxol- 
ogy to the acknowledgment of our own nothingness, 
and confess that the kingdom, the power, the glory, 
belong to God. 

And in all this there lies one of life's deepest les- 
sons. The curse and destruction of our being is the 

229 



2 30 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

reference of everything to self. What is it which 
makes the Hfe of so many millions of men mean and 
wretched? Is it not because they are the sole suns 
of their own systems? The universe to them is like 
that looking-glass room at Wartburg, which on every 
side reflects nothing but their own persons. They 
fill the air with the clamor of their own egotism, the 
fury of their own desires, the obstinacy of their own 
opinions, the querulousness of their own disappoint- 
ments. Now, until self be cast out of us, and God 
be suffered to take possession of our hearts, we are 
lost. It is this which Christ would teach us in the 
Lord's Prayer — the vision of all things in God; the 
viewing of every problem of life in the light of God ; 
the conquest of all evil in the strength and by the aid 
of God. Without God, alienated from God, man loses 
all that is manly, all that is divine in his own man- 
hood. He sinks below the beasts that perish. He 
sells his birthright for a mess of pottage. He becomes 
as the serpent for malignity, as the tiger for fury, as 
the wolf for greed, as the swine for degradation. 

** Unless above himself he can 
Erect himself, how mean a thing is man!" 

Man, with the seven devils of the seven deadly sins 
in his heart, is a thing to shudder at and to abhor; 
man with Christ in his heart becomes but a little lower 
than the angels, crowned with glory and honor. 

Thine is the poiver ! Scripture is full of this truth. 
" God spake once ; and twice also have I heard the 



THE POWER AND THE GLORY. 23 1 

same, that power belongeth unto God." It is visible 
enough even in this insignificant atom of a globe. 
When we say, *' Thy righteousness is like the strong 
mountains; Thy judgments are like the great deep," 
we say enough to show us our utter littleness even on 
the globe which is our transient home. Patriarchs 
and prophets, apostles and evangelists, knowing noth- 
ing of the secrets which science has revealed to us — 
only knowing the beauty and the wonder of this our 
poor little visible earth in its most superficial aspect 
— were yet convinced that the invisible things of God, 
even His eternal power and Godhead, were clearly 
manifested by the things visible. They needed no 
lesson but what they could learn from *' the mountain- 
peaks that stand, ridge beyond ridge, serene in the 
region of perpetual snow ; the summer clouds, images 
of such mountain tracts, even upon a grander scale 
and tinted with more gorgeous colors ; the thunder- 
cloud, with its dazzling bolt; the stormy ocean, with 
its mountainous waves ; the aurora borealis, with its 
mysterious pillars of fire; for all these are sublime, 
and all these elevate the soul, and make it acknowl- 
edge a mighty Worker in the elements." It was 
sufficient to the Psalmist that '' the heavens declare 
the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His 
handiwork " ; but how much more would this spec- 
tacle have branded into their souls the nothingness of 
man if they had known that there are five thousand 
firmaments of starry infinitude, and a hundred millions 
of fixed stars which are within telescopic reach ! And 



232 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

these are but '' the lumps which have flown from the 
potter's wheel of the Great Worker, — the shred- coils 
which, in the working, sprang from His mighty lathe 
— the sparks which started from His awful anvil when 
the solar system lay incandescent thereon — the curls 
of vapor which rose from the great cauldron of crea- 
tion when its elements were separated." 

Should it not be enough to prove to man the abso- 
luteness of his dependence, the depth of his insignifi- 
cance, that — though his earth travels in the year 
through four hundred milHons of miles round the sun 
— yet not only his own tiny system, but even the 
whole stellar galaxy, is probably but " an islet in the 
boundless void," a speck in the intense inane, the 
outermost fringe of an illimitable universe ? We talk 
of space, we live in space ; and yet space is a thing 
not only absolutely indefinable, but absolutely un- 
thinkable. It is a circle, of which the centre is every- 
where, the circumference nowhere. We cannot im- 
agine it as limited by any conceivable boundary, nor 
can we in any way grasp its '' endless extension and 
ever- widening infinitude." We can but confess that 
we are creatures of a day, crushed before the moth ; 
that man in himself is but *' a shadow less than shade, 
a nothing less than nothing," and that ''power be- 
longeth unto God." 

And, as Pascal pointed out, we stand between tivo 
infinitudes. There is another infinity beneath us. It 
does not need the starry heavens above to prove God's 
omnipotence. Vanini, when in prison on a false charge 



THE POWER AND THE GLORY. 233 

of atheism, touched a straw on his dungeon floor with 
his foot, and said to the jailers, " From that straw I 
can prove the being and almightiness of God." Yes, 
atheism stands branded with fatuity in every water- 
drop, in every emerald tuft of moss, in every stain of 
gray or orange lichen on the crag. The least of God's 
works is as infinitely beyond the reach of our cogni- 
zance as the greatest. 

What, then, is life ? One tick of the clock between 
two gulfs of eternal silence ; an atom suspended be- 
tween the two abysses of infinitude and nothingness. 
In this vast vacuity of incomprehensible being even 
man's imagination drops down, '' fluttering her pen- 
nons vain," and he sees himself to be but " an animal- 
cule in the Hmitless expanse, a mote in the faultless 
glory, a flutter in the eternal calm." 

Is there no lesson but curiosity in all this? There 
is this lesson, that there can be no effort so futile as 
the attempt to resist the will of God, and no infatu- 
ation so insensate as to kindle His displeasure. For 
if Reason reveals to us His dread magnificence. Con- 
science no less clearly whispers to us His revealed 
will. The physical Creator of the universe is also its 
moral Governor. Pitying man's abjectness apart from 
his Maker, God gave him those two great Archangels 
of Reason and Conscience to lead him along this path 
of duty: — Reason and Conscience, ''two ministers of 
His, who expound His purposes, who do His bidding." 
These two great Archangels are sent to us '' to con- 
duct our course, attending us on the right hand and 



234 ^^-^ LORD'S PRAYER. 

on the left ; walking by our sides with tranquil and 
steadfast countenances, with grave and measured 
steps; but making us feel that we may not deviate 
or stop lest they should turn upon us their intolerable 
looks of calm yet awful indignation." TJiine is tJie 
power! — and therefore it is utter madness for man, 
an ephemeris in these asons, to do anything but walk 
humbly with his God, in that obedience in which alone 
lies for any man the path of happiness, the path of 
safety. 

Thine is the power; and thine is the glory / That 
seems to me much more difficult to understand. For 
God is so infinite that nothing which we call human 
glory can furnish us with any analogy to His. We 
must go back again to the primary idea of the word 
glory, which is light and splendor. And not only 
does God '* cover Himself with light as with a gar- 
ment," but ''God is Hght." When we say ''Thine 
is the glory " we mean that without God the physical 
world would sink into a chaos of darkness, the moral 
world into an abyss of crime. In a starless night all 
is black; but from the moment that the dawn has 
kindled its first beacon-Hght of vivid crimson on the 
ice-clad mountain-peak, it fires — summit after summit 
— the splendor of the hills, and flows down their 
sides in rivers of molten gold. The streams flash into 
silver; the sea burns beneath the flood of radiance; 
the fields burst into color ; the forest leaves and dewy 
flowers gleam with millions of diamonds; the whole 
world thrills and burns with lustre and with life. Like 



THE POWER AND THE GLORY. 235 

that is the glory of God. God is light ; He is that 
light, bodiless and impalpable, from whose unempti- 
able fountain our earthly light is but a faint spark, or 
a dim shadow. 

And in God's heaven there shall be no night ; they 
need no lamp, neither light of the sun, for the Lord 
God giveth them light, and through the brimming 
flood of light — ** their wings of gold, their robes white 
as snow, their faces radiant as pure flame," in multi- 
tudes of splendors, like living topazes or living rubies, 
move the angels of God about the throne of Him who 

' ' Never but in unapproachecl light 
Dwelt from eternity : — dwelt then in thee, 
Bright effluence of bright essence uncreate, 
Or liear'st thou rather, pure ethereal stream 
Whose fountain who shall tell ? " 

And is there no lesson for us again in this our 
acknowledgment of the glory of God? Yes, there 
is this most searching lesson if we will learn it. The 
earthly correlative to *' God is Hght " is " Walk in the 
light." Be ye children of the light. Bring forth the 
fruits of light. Cast away the works of darkness, and 
put on the armor of light. To the dark, defiled heart 
should there be no healing agony in the thought that 
God is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity ? — that 
He searcheth the reins ; that no concealment is possi- 
ble from Him ; that He readeth the inmost thoughts ; 
that all things are naked and open before the eyes of 
Him with whom we have to do? 

All Christianity lies in the text that " God is light ; 



236 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

and darkness there is not in Him, no, not in any way." 
And in Christ He manifested Himself; and Christ 
said, ** I am the hght of the world. Walk while ye 
have the light, that ye may become sons of light." 
What is a jewel in the midnight? It is a cold chip 
of worthless stone ; but let light fall on it, and, in 
the words of that beloved great American Bishop, 
whom, to our deep grief, Christ has called away,* you 
may then see the jewel as it is — '' see depth opening 
beyond depth, until it looks as if there were no end 
to the chambers of splendor that are shut up in that 
little stone ; see flake after flake of luminous color 
floating up out of the unseen fountain which lies some- 
where in the jewel's heart." So is it with the human 
soul. If your soul is untouched by the transforming 
light of Christ, it is dull and vile. But when the Hght 
of God shines on it, it will be changed from glory to 
glory. The glory of God is the analogue of holiness 
in man. It is worse than vain for us to talk of God's 
glory if we live in the deeds of shame. If our Hfe 
grovels in the charnel-house of death and darkness, 
then for us the light hath shone in vain. 

If we would become partakers of God's glory there 
must be in us no subterfuges, no duplicity, no hidden 
places full of shame and sin, no secret chambers of 
unclean imagery, not two lives in one. O man, 
wouldst thou have a share in the glory of God ? Then 
must thou be open as the sunlight, transparent, sim- 
ple, sincere, guileless, pure, with no guilty secrets for 

* Phillips Brooks, Bishop of Massachusetts. 



THE POWER AND THE GLORY. 237 

which to bkish, with no dark spectres haunting the 
secret chambers of thy Hfe. 

Thine is the power and thine the glory. My friends, 
it is Christ alone that can reconcile us with that power 
whose laws we have offended, and give us back the 
image of that glory which we have defiled. A Ger- 
man poet, in his vision, was carried into the illimitable 
zone of worlds. The earth fell back into the abyss of 
distance ; heaven after heaven, galaxy after galaxy in 
the starry wilderness, unfurled before him their innu- 
merable banners, and reeled away behind him into the 
infinite ; and as he sped through dead seas of vacuity, 
and belts of unfathomable blackness, and new cycles 
of worlds, till his whole soul was terrified and faint, 
from the depths came floating to him a dark globe 
along a sea of light, and on it was a thorn-crowned 
Child. And lo! he says: ''I saw that the planet 
was this earth, and the child was the Child Jesus. 
He had come forth to comfort me, and threw on me 
a look of gentlest pity and unutterable love. Then 
in my heart I felt a sudden rapture of joy which 
passed all understanding, and in the tumult of that 
happiness I awoke and thanked God for life." 

My friends, in Christ alone shall we apprehend the 
power and glory of God. In His light alone shall we 
see light. Oh, that each soul here, which is now sit- 
ting in darkness and the shadow of death, would hear 
His call, ''Arise! shine, for thy light has come." 



FOR EVER AND EVER. 



239 



For ever and ever. 

St. Matthew vi. 13. 

THERE is very much more to say on these tre- 
mendous words than can at all be said in one 
sermon. I would only glance at them to-day in their 
most ordinary bearing. And do not let the profound- 
est person here think that this must be mere waste of 
time. On the contrary, all the ruin and all the misery 
of Hfe come to us, not because we are ignorant of what 
is original and recondite, but because we refuse to take 
home to our hearts the most obvious and every-day 
truths. There are many of God's children who hold 
very superficial views about time and eternity, who 
yet rightly apprehend and wisely shape their hves 
by the great fact that, though life is short, yet the 
soul is immortal ; and that the manner in which we 
spend this brief day is of infinite significance in its 
bearing on the endless life beyond. 

For ever and ever ! When the Saxon nobles were 
gathered in Godmundham, in the hall of Edwin of 
Deira, to hear the Roman missionary Paulinus plead 
the truth of Christianity, an aged warrior rose and 
said, '' O king, the life of man on this earth, In com- 
parison to the unknown space, is like that which may 
happen when you and your -nobles are seated at 

241 



242 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

supper in the winter season, and when a fire is lighted 
in the midst, and the room filled with the genial 
heat, while the whirlwind rages and the snow falls 
outside, and a sparrow flutters quickly in at one 
door and flies as hastily out at the other. During 
the short time it is in the room the chill of winter 
does not touch it, but in an instant the serenity it has 
enjoyed in its flight has disappeared, and as you look 
upon it, it has flashed from the darkness of winter at 
one door into the darkness of winter in which it dis- 
appears at the other; such too is the brief measure 
of human life. We know not what went before ; we 
know not at all what shall follow iiter. If the new 
religion can teach us this, then it is one which, in my 
opinion, ought to be adopted by us.'' So spoke the 
Saxon warrior. We, brethren, have known that re- 
ligion, have been baptized into it from our infancy. 
If there are hundreds of us on whom those truths 
exercise no influence, or infinitely less influence than 
they should do, is it not because we fail to realize 
them ? and do we not fail to realize them because we 
never duly remind ourselves of them? 

For ever and ever ! The imagination which can 
enter into the meaning of those words reels before 
them. There is something awfully pathetic and mys- 
terious in the interminable procession of mankind over 
our earth. There are at this moment on the globe 
some fifteen hundred millions of human beings, pass- 
ing for their brief span across its surface. A few years 



FOR EVER AND EVER. 243 

3ast and they were not ; a few years hence and their 
place here will know them no more. The commonest 
things we use outlast us ; on those very benches shall 
be sitting generations yet unborn, long after we are 
dust. Out of the darkness, out of the great deep 
we all came ; into the darkness, into the great deep 
we all are going. We know not what we are ; we 
know not whence we came ; we know not what we 
shall be. No gleam comes, no whisper thrills from 
the other side of that curtain, " impenetrable as mid- 
night, yet thin as a spider's thread," through which 
we all must shortly pass. Only two or three broad 
elementary facts are clear to us — that God made us ; 
that our bodies are not ourselves ; that when we die 
we do not die ; that our well-being, here and hereafter, 
depends only on obeying the will of God; that all 
else is, in comparison, less than nothing. The bridge 
of three-score and ten arches, and one or two broken 
ones beyond it, with a black cloud at either end of 
it, and many trapdoors through which multitudes are 
dropping every moment into the rolHng waters of that 
prodigious tide — yes, that remains a most true picture 
of human life ! 

And should we not expect that men would at least 
be serious in this short journey, and do justly, and 
love mercy, and walk humbly with their God? We 
live for a moment ; we shall live for ever and ever. 
Yet how are we occupying ourselves ? Multitudes 
of us in chasing bubbles. 



244 ^^^ LORD'S PRAYER. 

" Things needful we have thought on ; but the thing 
Of all most needful — that which Scripture terms, 
As if alone it merited regard, 
The one thing needful — that's yet unconsidered." 

How can this be, except because we yield habitually 
to the stupid sorcery of things near and present? 
" * What mean,' said I, ' those great flights of raven- 
ous birds that are perpetually hovering over the 
bridge?' 'These,' said the Genius, 'are envy, ava- 
rice, superstition, despair, love, with the like cares 
and passions that infest human life.' 'Alas!' said I, 
' man was made in vain I How is he given away to 
misery and mortality, tortured in life, and swallowed 
up in death!' " You know, my brethren, for you are 
Christians, that no one of us need either be tortured 
in life or swallowed up by death ; but rather richly 
blessed by life, and nobly crowned in death. It all 
depends on whether in this life we have laid up our 
treasure on earth, where the moth and rust corrupt, 
and thieves break through and steal, or whether our 
treasures are, where our hearts are, laid up in heaven, 
hid in Christ with God. 

For ever and ever ! I am quite sure that God 
meant us constantly to bear in mind — never to let 
our thoughts stray from the fact — that life is short, 
opportunity fleeting, the soul immortal, the destinies 
of the soul deeply colored, if not forever fixed, by the 
actions of to-day. Not Scripture only, but nature, 
life, biography, history, literature, experience, are full 
of reminders that life is but a fading flower, a house 



FOR EVER AND EVER. 



245 



of clay, a shepherd's tent, the flashing to and fro of 
a weaver's shuttle, a brook which feels the glare and 
disappears, foam upon the water, smoke that vanishes, 
a cloud, a mist, a mirage, the flight of a bird through 
the unrippled air, the pathway of a keel in glassy 
waters. Like a dream when one awaketh — that is 
its epitaph. Nature is full of death. The leaf falls, 
the tree dies, the gray earth is wrinkled with the 
graves of her children. From the rocky hills and from 
the rolling waves start up in numbers numberless, 
from ''ever-extending pavements of gravestones," the 
spectres of dead individuals, dead races, dead genera, 
a universe of dissolution. Life is full of death. The 
air is tremulous with knells ; there are vacant chairs 
in our homes ; the dust is strewn over the faces that 
we loved. What is man, whose breath is in his nos- 
trils ? Behold, we die, we perish, we all perish ! 

For ever and ever ! Two things are most notice- 
able about our life here : that it is so brief, and that it 
is so silent The young cherish the vain delusion that 
life is long, but God has only made our days, even 
for the oldest, a span long. What is our life ? It is 
even as a vapor, so soon passeth it away and we are 
gone. And it is in deep, unbroken silence that the 
years allotted to us pass away. They make no noise 
as they roll over our heads. The stream of time flows 
on with the profoundest stillness. All that we know 
is that it has passed us, and we can only wonder that 
it should so soon have sped. 

We wake with a start, and find that the summer is 



246 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

gone, the autumn ended, and we are not saved. The 
boy wakes with a start to find himself a man, un- 
equipped for hfe's battle, a wasted boyhood with all 
its lost store of golden opportunities behind him. The 
man wakes with a start to find himself an old man ; 
to find that his life is practically over, his work prac- 
tically done, and that nothing remains for him but to 
sink into the dark river, over the sudden precipice of 
an accident, or down the Hngering declivities of a dis- 
ease. And so, for each of us in turn, the universal 
truism becomes the personal experience. For we do 
not take these lessons to heart when we might do so 
with the deepest profit, and 

"All men think all men mortal but themselves." 

For ever and ever ! Is it not the worst of follies 
to let the fact of the shortness of Hfe have no effect 
— for to most men it practically has no effect — upon 
our conduct? And I am sure that it was to make 
this truth more powerfully sway our motives that God 
made this Hfe, not only so brief, but also, in its purely 
temporal interests, so empty. Yet even this universal 
lesson we will not learn. ''Jesus once said," so runs 
the legend in the Koran, '' * The world is like a woman 
who said she had too many husbands to count.' 
' Did they die ? ' He asked. ' Nay,' she answered, ' I 
always murdered them.' 'Strange,' said Jesus, 'that 
the rest were so foolish as to love thee still, though 
they saw the fate of all their predecessors.' " 

" If," exclaimed St. Chrysostom, " I were the most 



FOR EVER AND EVER. 247 

eloquent man in all the world, and my pulpit were a 
mountain-top, and the whole world were gathered for 
my congregation, I would preach on no other text 
than this: 'Oh! ye sons of men, how long will ye 
have such pleasure in vanity, and seek after leas- 
ing? ' " And yet it would be in vain, for God's les- 
sons are in vain. Men act as if a madman should 
spend all he had on furnishing the cabin which he 
would only occupy for an hour's voyage, and leave 
himself to be landed helpless and penniless on the 
land where all his means would be most needed and 
all his future would be spent. 

Look how men on all sides of us are toiling for 
riches, and making so vast a provision for so short a 
journey. " He that getteth riches," says Jeremiah, 
" and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of 
his days, and at the end shall be a fool." 

Fame ? Who does not know that it is always '' half 
disfam.e," that ** it is the misery of being great still to 
be aimed at " ? The great are a helpless mark for the 
coarse lies and vulgarities of a peering malice, and the 
sad weak beast of envy always wounds those that at- 
tain distinction. 

And military glory ? Is there not always '' the 
spear of Mantinea in the side of Epaminondas " ? 

The wreath of the poet, then? Yet how many 
poets, in despondency and madness, have sighed with 
the great Petrarch, " Some can still rejoice ; but for 
me, I see not what anything in the world can give 
me save tears." 



248 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

Success then, and rank, and power? Yet, even in 
this century, more than one English prime minister 
has died with an almost broken heart; and the great 
Pope counted his unexpected elevation to that giddy 
height as the most irretrievable of his misfortunes ; 
and the great archbishop wrote to Lord Strafford, '* I 
look not for many days, for I am not well ; nor for 
happiness, for ever since this honor has come to me I 
have felt a kind of sadness upon me." '' I swear," 
says the unhappy young Queen, in Shakespeare, 

" ' 'Tis better to be lowly born, 
And range with humble livers in content, 
Than to be perked up in a glistering grief 
And wear a golden sorrow.' " 

Indeed, I hardly know which are most to be pitied, 
— those who have madly desired something all their 
lives, and wounded their consciences, and have, after 
all, failed to reach the poor glittering bubble ; or 
those who have reached it, and at whose touch it has 
burst. There was once a splendid orator,* who, aim- 
ing at a splendid prize, turned his back on his most 
righteous convictions ; and of him the poet wrote the 
stern lines, '' Ichabod " — 

" So fallen! so lost ! the light withdrawn 
Which once he wore ; 
The glory from his gray hairs gone 
Forevermore. 

* Daniel Webster. The lines are by J. G. Whittier. 



FOR EVER AND EVER. 249 

" Revile him not! The tempter hath 
A snare for all ; 
And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath, 
Befit his fall ! 

** Of all we loved and honored, naught 
Save power remains ; 
A fallen angel's pride of thought 
Still strong in chains. 

" All else is gone : from those great eyes 
The light has fled : 
When faith is lost, when honor dies, 
The man is dead !" 

It was frightful to play for a great stake, to fling away 
what was loftiest in purpose for it, and yet in the end 
to lose it ; but, after all, it would have been as worth- 
less — perhaps even more bitter, more empty, more 
unsatisfying — if he had obtained it for a few brief 
years. 

That is what happens to men : they sell their souls 
for the promise of a mess of pottage. Sometimes the 
devil gives them their mess of pottage, and years 
after come the awakening shame and the exceeding 
bitter cry. They pluck the forbidden fruit, and no 
sooner have they tasted it than it turns in the mouth 
into dust and ashes. No ''powerful snatch" at the 
devil's gilded lure can ever escape the anguish of the 
lacerating hook. It is the lesson put with such im- 
mense power by Shakespeare in his Macbeth. That 
mighty play represents the Nemesis of conscience. 
It comes out in such lines of the murderer-king as : 



250 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

content." 



" Naught's had, all's spent, 
When our desire is got without C( 



Or, again — 

" Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown. 
And put a barren sceptre in my gripe, 
Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal hand, 
No son of mine succeeding. If 't be so. 
For Banquo's issue have I fil'd my mind ; 
For them the gracious Duncan have I murthered, 
Put rancors in the vessel of my peace 
Only for them ; and mine eternal jewel 
Given to the common enemy of man. 
To make them kings — the seed of Banquo kings!" 

Even so; every soul which sells itself for greed, or 
pleasure, or success, or any earthly thing, by deviat- 
ing but a hair's-breadth from the path of righteous- 
ness, must inevitably hear the terrible word of its 
Creator, *' Thus saith the Lord, thou hast sold thyself 
for naught." 

For ever mid ever ! Oh, my friends, it is easy to 
sweep these facts aside as truisms, as platitudes ; it is 
terribly difficult to reaHze that on these truisms, on 
these platitudes, verified by the experience of all man- 
kind, depends the whole meaning of our present and 
our future. Let me suppose that you are prosperous, 
at ease, comfortable ; that the world for the time be- 
ing satisfies you ; that you have not yet discovered 
that you are giving your money for that which Is not 
bread, and your labor for that which satisfieth not. 
Well, may it not merely be that " Ephraim hath gray 
hairs upon him, and knoweth it not"? May it not 



FOR EVER AND EVER. 25 I 

be that the meridian of worldliness is being left un- 
vexed ? May it not be that God has said, " Ephraim 
is turned unto idols ; let him alone " ? Might not an 
utter self-disgust, might not a divine discontent, be a 
healthier and more hopeful state for you than this 
settling upon the lees? Is it good, in the place of 
the twelve fair fruits of the Spirit, to be content with 
a fungus brood of vile delights, or, at best, of passing 
pleasures? — 

" Sickly and pale, 
Dull mushrooms colored like a corpse's cheek." 

In any case, how long will your ignoble content- 
ment last? 

Once, when a king was being conducted in a splen- 
did triumphal procession, in all the intoxication of 
human pride and glory, one of his flattering courtiers 
asked him, ''What is wanting here?" And with a 
sigh answered the magnificent monarch, "Continu- 
ance!" Yes, "'for ever and ever." That belongs 
only to what is divine in man. Continuance, perma- 
nence, is the stamp of the eternal life ; evanescence, 
momentariness, the blight of this. 

All the things we hold for pleasant and needful, 
even when they do not lift up the sluices of a flood 
of calamity to drown us, yet do not outweigh one 
atom of holy bliss. Even if the things for which men 
toil and moil, and weary themselves in the very fire, 
could last, they could not satisfy the noblest nature 
for a day ; they could not satisfy even the meanest 
for a year. Shall we then leave our souls in this 



252 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

heap of mud? Shall we spend and strain our efforts 
to gain this " dust in the midnight " ? Why, it would 
be even worse for us if such things did last! Of- 
their own selves they would dwarf us into vileness 
and insignificance. Believe m.e, 

' ' The worst of miseries 
Is when a nature, framed for nobler things. 
Condemns itself in life to petty joys. 
And, sore athirst for air, breathes scanty life 
Gasping from out the shallows." 

For ever and ever / Death is near us all. How 
near none of us know, but near even to those for 
whom it seems furthest. Ought not, then, our one 
prayer to be the prayer of St. Thomas of Aquino, 
'' Give me, O Lord, a noble heart, which no earthly 
affections can drag down"? And, to attain our 
prayer, the secret is, "' Love not the present things, 
of which the possession burdens, of w^hich the love 
defiles, of which the loss tortures; but love those 
things only which shall last for ever and ever." The 
day is at hand when the world and all that is there- 
in shall perish. Will all have vanished ? Will noth- 
ing stay ? Will man, too, perish in that consuming 
surge? Not so! Innocence and hoHness are be- 
yond the reach of destruction. Death is impotent 
against true nobleness. It has no power over faith- 
ful service. Its dart strikes no pang into the breast 
of humble duty. It cannot weaken the wings of 
prayer, or disturb the serenity of conscience, or cal- 



FOR EVER AND EVER. 253 

cine one gem in the treasury of heaven, or shrivel 
one hne on the pages of the Lamb's Book of Life. 
For ever and ever I Think of it ! We are 

" Of far too infinite an essence 
To be contented with the lies of Time." 

Why, then, do we forsake the Hving fountains for our 
broken cisterns ? He who eateth of this bread shall 
hunger, he w^ho drinketh this water shall thirst again ; 
but he who eateth the bread of life, and drinketh of 
the w^ater which Christ shall give him, shall hunger 
and thirst no more. Lord, give us that water ! Lord, 
evermore give us that bread from heaven, which is 
Thyself ! Give it us as we kneel at Thy holy table ; 
give it to us now and forever, and forevermore ! 



AMEN 



255 



These things saith the Amen, the faithful 
and true witness. 

Revelation iii. 14. 

DURING my last month in this Abbey church I 
endeavored to bring before you, clause by clause, 
the profound, I might say, the unfathomable, signifi- 
cance of the Lord's Prayer. Every year leaves me 
more unalterably convinced that the sole deliverance 
from our follies, our perils, our wanderings, whether 
in the nation, or in the Church, or in our individual 
lives, lies in grasping the undisputed verities, and in 
shaking ourselves free from the fantastic accretions to 
the religious truths of the Gospel. If we would really 
know God, it will not do to rely on ecclesiastic shams, 
or traditional falsities, or exorbitant inferences based 
on isolated texts. We must build ourselves on the 
solid fundamental truths of elementary religion and 
on the primary requirements of elementary morahty, 
as on the granite bases of the world. It is to these 
things, not to the phantasmagoria of those corrupt 
and anti- Christian developments, which have their 
origin in the eternal Pharisaism of the human heart, 
— it is to the simplicity that is in Christ Jesus, it is 
therefore to true religion, as apart from false and 
finical religionism, that I have been trying to direct 

?57 



258 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

your whole attention. By this alone can we be en- 
nobled ; by this alone can we be saved. 

From the ten words, the utterances of the voice of 
God from Sinai, we learned that what that supreme 
and sacred majesty requires of us is innocence alone ; 
that religion is neither a petty ceremonialism nor an 
ecclesiastical system, but a good heart and a good 
life ; that, when all is said or done that theologians 
can say or priests can do, the only end of a holy life 
is to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly 
with our God. From the Lord's Prayer we learned 
that true godliness depends on our relation to our 
Father in heaven; on our reverence for His holy 
name ; on our efforts to further His kingdom ; on 
our determination to do His will ; on our toil for the 
bread of life ; on our forgiveness of our brethren, as 
the condition of that divine forgiveness which each 
of us so sorely needs ; on our struggle against temp- 
tation ; on our prayer and effort to be delivered from 
the evil. The Ten Commandments are the catechism 
of all morality ; in the Lord's Prayer lies the essence 
of all reUgion which is pure and undefiled. 

I wish to consider now the word with which the 
Lord's Prayer closes — the word Amen. It is the 
signacultLin consensus, the seal of our faith, and the 
votnm desiderii, the fervency of our longing. It is 
the stamp of the sincerity with which every prayer 
is offered. I do not propose to-day to dwell on its 
liturgical use, but rather on its inmost and essential 
significance. It is a very solemn and sacred word. 



AMEN. 259 

In the Gospel of St. John alone, no less than twenty- 
five times our Lord Jesus Christ introduces His deep- 
est asseverations with ''Amen, Amen " — translated in 
our version, ''Verily, verily — I say unto you." But 
I cannot show you the dignity of the word more aw- 
fully than by telling you that in the Old Testament 
this word "Amen " is given as the very name of God, 
and in the New Testament as the very name of Christ. 
In Isaiah (Ixv. 16) we read, "And He shall call His 
servants by another name, so that he who blesseth 
himself in the earth shall bless himself in the God of 
Avien, and he who sweareth in the earth shall swear 
by the God of Amen." In the New Testament we 
read that in Christ is the Amen ; and St. John says 
in my text, " Thus saith the Amen, the true and 
faithful witness." 

What, then, is the meaning of this solemn and 
sacred word? It means Truth; it means ReaHty. 
Every time we use it we should be reminded that 
God is not the God of fantasies and shams, but that 
He is the God of reaHty and of truth. And I want 
this afternoon to bring before you the awfulness of 
truth — i.e., of reality, of sincerity, of guileless simplic- 
ity, both as regards the life that now is, and as re- 
gards the eternal life which is the life of man's spirit. 

First, as regards our earthly life. We may spend 
our lives either in the world or in God. If we live 
in God, if the life which we now live in the flesh is 
Hved in the faith of the Son of God, then are we liv- 
ing in the world of reality ; if we are living for the 



260 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

world, if we are setting our affections on the things 
of the earth, we are Hving in the midst of fatal delu- 
sions and fading shadows. 

There is a celebrated passage in which the great 
Greek philosopher, Plato, describes the life of men 
on earth. He compares men who have never tried 
to face the truth to prisoners in a deep underground 
cavern, who have been so chained by the neck and 
feet that they cannot turn their heads. In front of 
them is the rocky wall of their prison-house. Behind 
them and above them is a causeway, on which fires 
are burning, and along this causeway pass wayfarers 
singing and conversing and bearing burdens, whose 
shadows are thrown by the firelight on the cavern 
wall, and whose voices are reflected back from it. 
The imprisoned denizens of the dark cave, seeing only 
these flickering shadows, take them for substances 
and realities ; and hearing only these vague echoes, 
take them for songs and voices. And if one of them 
should be carried up a path which winds behind the 
cave, and should see the real men and hear the actual 
voices, and look on the fire which casts the shadows, 
and should then be ordered back again to the cavern 
prison, his eyes, dazed by the light, would be unac- 
customed to the gloom, and by his fellow-prisoners 
he would only be despised and hated as a half- crazed 
mystic ; while he, on his part, would scorn their belief 
in shadows, and the importance they attached to such 
dim and distant unreaHties. 

The image of the great heathen thinker still re- 



AMEN. 261 

mains true. Imprisoned in self-chosen darkness, 
steeped in emptinesses, how few among living men 
even care for that wisdom which consists in seeing 
the things that are, and seeing them as they are! 
Let a man but once catch a glimpse of the true light 
and he learns utterly to despise the dim rush-light of 
this world's tinselled stage. Let one ray out of eter- 
nity shine down upon him, and for him the world and 
the things of the world shrivel into insignificance. 

Take the two lives which are most prominently 
brought before us in the annals of Israel — the life of 
Solomon the king, and the Hfe of Elijah the prophet. 
Solomon lived amid shams. If a man could be 
made happy by dazzling magnificence, by dizzy 
exaltation, by the soft seductions of luxury, who so 
happy as that great king, with his golden thrones and 
ivory palaces and voluptuous harem ? Did the shad- 
ows give him happiness ? " Vanity of vanities," saith 
the preacher, "'vanity of vanities, all is vanity!" It 
was all thrice- doubled emptiness. Solomon was a 
miserable man. 

" Who follows pleasure, pleasure slays; 
God's wrath upon hhnself he wreaks." 

Solomon found, as all men find, even under the most 
favorable circumstances, that the soul cannot live upon 
these coarse and barren husks. What did he get out 
of them? Did he get happiness? even pleasure? 
No. Bitter disappointment; enervated lassitude; a 
loveless home ; a heart consumed to ashes ; the 



262 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

loathliness of satiety ; the misery of the unsatisfied ; 
the despair of the faithless, and the shame of the un- 
clean. Not so the rough prophet of the wilderness. 
He had no wealth but the hairy mantle ; no rank but 
the royalty of inward manhood ; no luxury but cruse 
of oil and barrel of meal; no home but caves and 
dens of the earth ; no popularity — prophets and re- 
formers never have — but the proud man's scorn and 
the base man's sneer. But he heard the words of 
God, and saw the vision of the Almighty ; and he 
shone on the Mount of Transfiguration beside his 
Lord. And St. James appeals to him as the most 
striking example of the prayer w^hich moves the arm 
of Him who moves the world. 

It is the lesson which Robert Browning points in 
his epistle of Karshish. To Lazarus, who has been 
raised from the dead, the earthly estimate of things 
important is reversed. Trifles seem to him of con- 
summate significance ; events deemed great become 
as nothing. 

" Whence has the man the balm that brightens all ? 
This grown man eyes the world now like a child. 
Should his child sicken unto death, — why look 
For scarce abatement of his cheerfulness 
Or pretermission of the daily craft ; 
While a word, gesture, glance from that same child 
At play or in the school or laid asleep 
Will startle him to an agony of fear. 
Thus is the man as harmless as a lambj 
Only impatient, let him do his best, 
At ignorance and carelessness and sin ; — 
An indignation which is promptly curbed." 



AMEN. 263 

This is the picture of a man to whom the falsities 
of earth are less than nothing, because the truth of 
God is all in all. And when a man thus reahzes the 
Eternal and lives in the Unseen, he often becomes 
a prophet, and will meet a prophet's doom. If he 
boldly rebukes vice and error he must be prepared 
to suffer patiently for the truth's sake. The world 
regards such men with mixed hatred and contempt. 
Ahabs and Jezebels persecute them ; Pharisees slan- 
der, and do their best to crucify them; worldlings 
call them fanatics and faddists, as they call all who 
take part in real reforms. Priests, devoted to sur- 
face and semblance, smite them on the cheek, as the 
Priest Pashur smote Jeremiah ; or mock them, as they 
mocked Isaiah ; or say that they have a devil, as they 
said of John the Baptist ; or call them Samaritans, as 
they called Christ. Happy are they ! The enmity 
of the world, and the world's sham religion, shows 
that they are not living for and amid its shadows, but 
for and amid the realities of friendship with God. 

Which are you .doing? The world is seen and 
near and present ; it looks alluring and seductive as 
that crude apple looked to Eve. It glows like the 
rosy rind of the Dead Sea fruit ; it glitters like the 
fresh scales of the sloughed serpent ; it fascinates like 
the siren's maddening song. But did anything ever 
come of it except misery and disappointment — the 
whirlwind harvest from the sown wind ? ** Rejoice, 
O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart cheer 
thee in the days of thy youth ; and walk in the ways 



264 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes. But 
know thou that for all these things God shall bring 
thee into judgment." God is the Amen, the Eternal 
Reality. He has set His canons against fraud, and 
Hes, and hate, and lust. Obey Him or disobey Him, 
" at your pleasure and at your peril." Believe in Him 
or disbelieve in Him, at your pleasure and at your 
peril. But He is, and His law is, the sole truth of 
your life. 

Sow a pleasant vice, and reap its poisonous har- 
vest ; sow a crime, and reap a retribution ; sow a 
lust, and reap a ruin and a degradation; sow to the 
flesh, and reap corruption. These things are unreal, 
as a dream when one awaketh ; their fashion passeth 
away like a vapor. The mere shams of earth, the 
vain and vile delights of the vicious life, are as the 
poison of asps. They involve a multiplicity of horri- 
ble miseries, as if a man did flee from a lion and a 
bear met him, or went into a house and leaned his 
hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him. But God 
is the Amen, the Eternal Truth, of reality and of 
righteousness. 

Earnestly, then, I would Invite you all to base 
yourselves on the Amen, on the solid and ultimate 
reality of life, by denying ungodliness and worldly 
lusts, and Hving soberly, righteously, and godly in 
this present world; and to base your lives on the 
Amen of true religion ; on those things which cannot 
be shaken, but remain. In these days, as in all days, 
a great deal is mixed up with religion, and thrust into 



AMEN. 265 

factitious importance in it, wliich is not religion, and 
has nothing whatever to do with the God of Amen, 
with the Christ who is the Amen, the faithful and true 
witness. He who makes the eternal Church depend 
on mere outward forms ; he who bases its high claims 
on some unprovable theory, which may be a pure 
fiction ; he who confounds religion with the shibbo- 
leths of sects or of parties, or the usurpation of priests, 
builds upon the baseless and shifting sands. Of mul- 
titudes of views and practices now thrust by force on 
vexed and alienated nations, we can only say : 

" The earth has bubbles, as the water hath, 
And these are of them." 

The Church depends solely on the presence of 
Christ. Where Christ is, there His Church is ; and 
where love and holiness are, there Christ is. Where- 
ever we find the fruits of the Spirit — love and meek- 
ness — there the Spirit is ; where we find the works 
of the flesh, such as arrogance and slander, there, in 
spite of all boasts and pretences, the Spirit is not. 
The title-deeds of the Church are her holiness and the 
purity of her witness, not fables and vain genealogies. 
The reality of the Lord's Supper lies not in a gross 
materialism, but in the spiritual presence of Christ 
in the heart of the faithful receiver. The efficacy of 
the Sacrament does not depend one iota on the time 
when it is eaten, but on the repentance, faith, humil- 
ity, and love of the receiver. The witness of the 
Church is not to the doctrines and commandments 



266 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

of men, elaborated amid the corruptions of the third 
and fourth centuries, and perpetuated through dark 
ages of oppression, robbery, and fraud; but, when 
she is awake to her true functions, she is a witness to 
the great simple verities of the Apostles' Creed as the 
foundations of religion ; a witness to the broad truths 
taught us in the Lord's Prayer; and a witness to the 
eternal validity of the Ten Commandments as the 
foundations of morality. 

Sweep away from your religion as much as you 
will the infinite cobwebs which the ambition and the 
ignorance of men have spun for centuries over the 
whole surface of the faith. Fling to the four winds 
the voluntary humility and all the vain deceits, tra- 
ditions, and ordinances, which, like those of Judaism, 
are but '' weak and beggarly elements." Distinguish 
between the flickering shadows of disputed miinutias 
and the Catholic verities of the eternal faith. Dis- 
tinguish between valueless injunctions of touch not, 
taste not, handle not, and the eternal distinctions 
which brand uncleanness, drunkenness, and hate. The 
kingdom of God standeth not on food and drink, but 
is righteousness, peace, and joy in believing. You 
will not find Christ by following the sects and parties 
who shout with anathemas '' Lo, He is here!" or 
*' Lo, He is there!" but if you faithfully serve Him, 
Christ is with you, and shall be in you. "To me," 
said a deep religious thinker and divine, "it seems to 
be one of the greatest prodigies in the world that 
men who are rational and intelligent should take that 



AMEN, 267 

for religion which for its shallowness, emptiness, and 
insignificancy falls under the just reproof, conviction, 
and condemnation of reason." That is not religion 
which is not free and manly. ReHgion has nothing 
to do with mawkish and feminine sentimentalism. 
No one can be a true Christian who is not also a true 
man. 

Reason and conscience, illuminated by faith and 
prayer, these are the torch-bearers of truth. Seek 
truth, and you will find it, because God is the God 
of truth. If you desire heaven you must win it ; for 
heaven is a temper, not a place. No priest can give 
it you ; no ritual can give it you ; no mere ordinances 
of men can open its doors for you so much as a single 
inch. You must win it by that obedience to God's 
laws which nothing but the grace of Christ can en- 
able you to render. The simple eternal tests are not 
whether you are a Churchman or a Dissenter, nor 
whether you understand the '* Real Presence " in this 
sense or in that, nor whether you submit your free 
necks and free consciences to the yoke of others or 
not; but he that doeth righteousness is righteous, 
and he that doeth righteousness is born of God. The 
errors, effeminacies, and failures of popular religion all 
spring up because men trouble themselves about the 
forms of worship rather than the object of worship ; 
because men are more concerned for that which is 
their own in rehgion, than that which is God's ; and 
because they want to make religion, and define relig- 
ion, and display religion, rather than to evidence its 



268 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

reality in meek and loving lives. The essence of 
religious falsity lies in neglecting those necessary and 
vital doctrines, respecting which Scripture is clear and 
full, for those mere idoHsms of which it says little or 
nothing ; idols of theory and dogma v/hich lessen 
charity and multiply divisions. Religious partisans 
show the greatest zeal for what is doubtful, question- 
able, and valueless ; and often pass over the whole 
message and meaning of Scripture for the sake of 
some gross misinterpretation of a single text. They 
tithe, as of old, mint and anise and cumin, but omit 
and show no sign of the eternal Amen of judgment, 
mercy, and faith. But God is the God of the Amen 
— i.e., of the truth. 

Let us then look to the bases of our faith, and to 
the bases of our conduct; and let the question often 
ring like the voice of conscience — ''the home- God 
within us" — and if need be roll with the thunders of 
Sinai, Will ye, by hypocrisy in conduct, will ye, by 
petty apostasy and unreaHty in faith, ''oflfer to God 
the unclean sacrifice of a He" ? 

Reality, sincerity, holiness; the elementary Chris- 
tian graces — faith, hope, love ; the primary Christian 
duties — soberness, temperance, chastity — these are 
the end and these are the test of all true religion. 
Apart from these all else is but fringes and phylac- 
teries. If, by the aid of God's Holy Spirit, you have 
these, though all parties excommunicate you, and 
all priests anathematize, nothing can harm you ; and 
when you pass from the babble of the world's male- 



AMEN. 269 

diction, and the falsehoods of the representatives of 
nominal and erring religion, clear and high for you 
shall peal the eternal verdict, *' Well done, good and 
faithful servant! enter thou into the joy of thy Lord." 
If you have not these, all the world may praise you ; 
you may be throned with Annas and Caiaphas ; your 
name be written with fulsome eulogies in every hagi- 
ology ; — but you will hear at the last the awful judg- 
ment, *'Amen, I say unto you, I never knew you; de- 
part from Me, ye workers of iniquity." 



II. 



And all the people said Amen, and praised 
the Lord. 

I Chronicles xvi. 36. 

I HAVE already preached on the word "Amen," 
as the name by which God calls Himself in the 
Old Testament, where He is the '* God of Amen "— 
i.e.y of eternal, essential Truth — and as the name by 
which Christ calls Himself in the New Testament: 
'* These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true 
witness." I purpose now to speak to you briefly on 
the Uturgical use of the word : its use in our public 
services and in our private prayers. We use it inces- 
santly ; is it not desirable that we should grasp some- 
thing of its significance? 

In itself the word means '' truth." It is often ren- 
dered in our Bible '' verily," as in the many sayings 
of our Lord which begin, ** Verily, verily I say unto 
you." It means fiat (''Be it so!" ''May this be 
fulfilled!"). As we use it, then, in every prayer, it 
is the signacuhim consensus nostri, the stamp and 
seal of our faith ; and it is also the votttm desidcrii 
nostri, the expression of our ardent desire, the cry of 
our fervent hope. It is a prayer in itself, a separate 
prayer, a prayer that all our prayers may be fulfilled. 

271 



2 72 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

It expresses at once our expectation and our con- 
fidence. Both are needed. Too often we pray as 
those who mean nothing by their prayer, who expect 
nothing from their prayer, who hardly believe in 
Him to whom their prayers are addressed. All this 
reverses the true idea of prayer, and to all this our 
"Amen " is a rebuke. 

There are certain words of which the mere sound 
acquires an additional sanctity from their many beau- 
tiful and solemn associations. "Amen " is one of 
them. Like " Hallelujah," like " Hosanna," like 
*' Kyrie Eleison," we take such words from their 
original Hebrew and their original Greek, because 
we would fain embalm them in the hallowed mem- 
ories derived from their use by generations of the 
Communion of Saints. Remember how, after all the 
blessings of Gerizim and the curses of Ebal, we find 
the rubric of Moses : "And all the people shall say 
Amen." When David nominates Solomon to the 
throne of his kingdom the priestly soldier Benaiah 
answers, "Amen! the Lord God of my lord the king 
say so too." When David brought the Ark to Zion 
with songs and dances, " all the people said Amen, 
and praised the Lord." And after some of the most 
jubilant outbursts of the Psalms we find Amen and 
Amen. The apostolic benediction is sealed with its 
Amen. Most of the books of the New Testament 
end with Amen. In the last book of the Bible, after 
the Hallelujah, anthem of the angel hosts, the Immor- 
talities around the throne of God and of the Lamb 



AMEN. 273 

cry Amen ; and in its last chapter, and its last words, 
" He that testifieth these things saith, Surely I come 
quickly," and the bride answers, ^'Amen. Even so 
come. Lord Jesus." *' If we say Amen to God's 
call, He says Amen to our deliverance." Thus, in 
heaven and on earth there is the acclamation and 
the echo to this lovely and faithful cry, by which the 
human soul acknowledges the God of the Amen, the 
God of perfect sincerity and truth. 

Naturally, therefore, the use of this word has been 
precious in the Church of God. But not in the 
Church of God only. There are but three mono- 
theistic religions in the world — the Jewish, the Ma- 
hometan, the Christian, They all originated from 
centres within a few days' journey of each other — 
from Sinai, from Jerusalem, from Mecca. The word 
belongs equally to all three. 

1. We have seen how thoroughly it belongs to 
God's ancient people. They used it in the wilder- 
ness three thousand five hundred years ago. They 
used it in the Temple after the ringing of the golden 
harps and the sound of the silver trumpets. The 
returning exiles were inspired and gladdened by it 
when Ezra, in the Temple court, blessed the great 
Lord God, and all the people stood up and answered 
Amen and Amen, lifting up their hands. They use 
it to this day at every service, with bowed heads and 
the inextinguishable expectancy of indomitable hope. 

2. And the Mahometans also, as well as the Jews, 
use it at every service. Mahomet had borrowed all 



2 74 ^-^-^ LORD'S PRAYER. 

that is best in his teaching from Jewish rabbis, and 
from a certain Sergius, a monk of the Church of 
Assyria. A traveller who visited and lived in almost 
every region of the globe tells us that the one service 
which affected him most of all which he had heard 
was in a Mahometan mosque. Alas ! that it should 
have been so, for he had heard many a Christian 
service. But this was in the Kaaba at Mecca, at the 
annual pilgrimage. An old man got up to preach, 
dressed in a snowy turban and a snowy robe which 
was half hidden under the soft fall of his long snow- 
white beard. He had not spoken long before his 
words were interrupted by an occasional "Amen!" 
And then, as he swayed and touched the hearts of 
his audience, as the trees of the wood are bowed by 
the summer wind, there arose from all the assembled 
multitude "Amen, Amen," and again, "Amen, Amen," 
repeated with the utmost fervency after almost every 
sentence, rising and falling like the dashing of rhyth- 
mic waves, and breathing into the ear of the Lord God 
of Sabaoth the concentrated essence of unnumbered 
prayers. If fervency, if sincerity be the heart of true 
worship, \ve are sure that those prayers were not in 
vain. 

3. Nor w^as it otherwise once among Christians. 
The Amen of the Christian congregation was once a 
real and solemn thing. The Christian poet Pruden- 
tius sings of the Amen, which with its resounding 
echo strikes the sky : 

" Et responsuris ferit dera vocibus Amen." 



AMEN. 275 

And St. Jerome tells us that, " at the end of every 
pubHc utterance of prayer and praise, the 'Amen' of 
the people sounded like the loud murmur of the sea, 
or the voice of thunder, while the hollow idols, and 
their temples that were empty, did echo and rebound 
the churches' Amen so that their fabrics shaked." 
And Dean Stanley writes : *' The consecration of the 
Lord's Supper was not complete till it had been rati- 
fied in the most solemn way by the congregation. 
For it was at this point that there came, like the peal 
of thunder, the one word which has lasted through 
all changes and all liturgies — the word which was in- 
tended to express the entire truthful assent of the peo- 
ple to what was done and said — the word *Amen,' " 

Thus the word was dearer for many a solemn 
association. Saints have faintly whispered it to the 
words of prayer uttered by their weeping loved ones 
beside their dying beds ; martyrs have sighed it forth 
ere they sank into heathen or Romish flames. When 
Cyprian was doomed to death by decapitation with 
the sword, he deemed it sufficient to express his glad 
submission to the will of God by breathing forth the 
one word "Amen." 

Would that the word were as real to us now! It 
still was so in the Puritan times. Men called the 
Puritans austere. In the orgies of the Restoration, 
in the Circean sty of the court of Charles II., on the 
polluted stage of the eighteenth century, Puritans and 
their followers of the great Evangelical revival were 
held up, by actors stained with every vice, to audi- 



276 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

ences degraded with all uncleanness, as sour and 
canting hypocrites. Naturally enough! The hiss 
of the world is the glory, because it proves the faith- 
fulness, of the holy ones of God. To godless world- 
lings all zeal is pretence, and all religion is cant ; and 
the only beautiful things — the subject of their Bac- 
chanalian and amorous songs — are the drink and 
sensual debasement which degrade man below the 
brutes. Puritanism was nobly austere in the dignity 
of a manhood which loved righteousness and hated 
shams. But was it sour? Well, I for one would 
rather enjoy one hour of Milton's rapture, or of the 
fervent hymns of Covenanters hunted into the wild 
sea caves, than whole years of the laughter of fools, 
which could not hide the retribution of the sated and 
the shame of the unclean. The Puritans at least 
knew how to pray. Their rehgion has not sunk into 
the formalism which cares for the ever- varying triv- 
ialities of rites and forms, and does not care to show 
one of the most elementary graces which Christ re- 
quires. The meaning of "Amen " had not become a 
dead letter to the Puritan. " When we set our seal 
to the truth of God, and say Amen," writes one 
Puritan divine, '' it is a word that fills heaven and 
earth; there is not a joyfuller word in the world." 
'' The united breath of God's people," writes another, 
" sends a blast upon their enemies. If any single 
soul pray in faith it shall be heard ; how much more 
when the whole congregation unanimously cries 
Amen. God will say Amen to such Amens!" 



AMEN. 277 

All this is altered now. The glad enthusiasm of 
early Christianity, the noble fervor of Puritanism, the 
earnest holiness of the Evangelical revival, alas! are 
dead. Christian people, how many of you have been 
saying ''Amen" — *'Amen " with your lips, ''Amen" 
in your hearts — to all the prayers in which we now 
have joined? Who hears in these days the "Amen " 
of the Christians in the catacomb, of the Covenanters 
in the mountain glen, like the roll of thunder or the 
roar of the deep sea ? It has dwindled into a mur- 
mur, it has died into an echo, it has become a me- 
chanical prayer. Alas ! alas ! Christian congregations 
are now too lazy to say "Amen." It is too much 
trouble. They let the clergy say "Amen " for them ; 
they let the choir sing "Amen " for them, while they 
dream into wandering thoughts. Ah, I wish that 
beside our choirs we had in every church the proper 
choir of some thousand voices. The choir leads in 
most churches, but how many of the congregation 
follow ? Many a time I have heard prayers to which 
the. response of large congregations has scarcely been 
a breath, a sigh, a barely audible shiver, as of the 
last sere aspen leaves in the autumn wind. Many 
are too much deadened by indolence and by famil- 
iarity, too indifferent to their own merely nominal 
prayers, too much absorbed in thoughts and cares 
and fancies — not always innocent or harmless ones — 
to tell God, even by a dissyllable, that they meant 
that prayer to be for them, that they desire the 
granting of its petition. Indeed, as Savonarola said 



278 THE LORD'S PRAYER. 

centuries ago, we have many fine ceremonies in these 
days — quite dramatic, quite magnificent. But unless 
the New Testament be meaningless, all the forms in 
the world are not so dear to Christ as one ''Amen" 
of one congregation uttered from a pure heart fer- 
vently. It is not the dress or the form, but the heart, 
which constitutes true religion. Of external para- 
phernalia Christ knew nothing, and the apostles knew 
nothing, and the burning-hearted faithfulness of the 
early Christian centuries knew nothing; but when 
Christians are Christians in something more than 
show — Christians of meek and loving hearts, pure, 
and kind, and true— then ''Amen " is pre-eminently 
the word of Christian congregations who w^ant to 
pray and not to be prayed for, to sing and not to be 
sung to. 

"All Christians," says Archbishop Leighton, " are 
God's clergy." "All Christians," says St. Peter, " are 
a royal priesthood." "All Christians," says St. John 
the beloved disciple, " are kings and priests." Alas! 
like Esau, most Christians are content to sell their 
birthright and their priesthood for a mess of pottage. 
They have forgotten — they have been fatally taught 
to forget — what Christ and the apostles taught : that 
there are in the Christian Church no priests except in 
so far as all are priests ; that owx presbyters are purely 
representative, and in no sense vicarious; that the 
veil of partition is rent asunder from the top through- 
out ; and that the very humblest may have free, un- 
impeded, personal access direct, and with no need for 



AMEN. 279 

any intermediary but Christ, into the immediate pres- 
ence, into the inmost audience-chamber, into the very 
Holy of Holies of the Eternal God. 

Oh! remember, then, in conclusion, that mere for- 
mal prayers — prayers said for you but unfelt within 
you, prayers read to you but not offered by you, 
worship at which you are present but in which you 
take no part — are utterly unavailing. You might 
just as well patent a machine to do it for you, as the 
Tartars do. But where prayers have not been the 
prayers of others mumbled for you in slovenly artifi- 
ciaUty, or in an unknown tongue, hvi\,your prayers, fer- 
vent, effectual, humble; when the heartfelt ''Amen " 
puts the petitions which you have offered into the 
hand of God ; when, in holy security of His faithful- 
ness and truth, your "Amen " is the expression of 
your belief in His love and wisdom, referring it to 
Him how and when He will answer, then indeed into 
your ''Amen" you will concentrate and put together 
all your requests, and, as Luther says, "As your 
Amen is, so has been your prayer." 



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